Hello Riley, and everyone participating. Your email is a very succinct
summary of what many are likely thinking right now about EZproxy, its
future, and open source or other alternatives.
As a nonprofit membership organization, OCLC strives to align its
pricingwith our mission to serve our members. Our
goal is to continue to deliver value through the EZproxy service at a price
that makes it accessible to as many libraries as possible, while continuing
to develop the service and provide support to its users. There are no plans
to substantially change the pricing model of the stand-alone EZproxy
service.
Regarding innovation, IPV6 development starts next month with an IPV6
release planned later this year. We also have some final testing on
EZproxy's GZIP compression functionality, as well as statistical reporting
features in the pipeline. And of course, we continue to make our
maintenance fixes and improvements. We will release as many features as we can
and continue to deliver increased value at a reasonable price.
We recognize and respect the importance of the open source ethic and the
breadth of open source activity in the library community and believe
libraries always benefit from having choices in the services they use. That
said, the EZproxy application provides great value to its users that would
not easily be replicated. In addition to the internal mechanics of
providing proxied access to remote users, it includes nearly 15 years of
ensuring access to hundreds of e-content targets--including a very long
tail--using many authentication models, both in libraries and with content
providers. With that in mind, we believe the current model is quite
reasonable compared to rebuilding that kind of effort from scratch.
We look forward to enhancing the stand-alone EZproxy service under its new
business model as well as enhancing the service offered with the turn-key
hosted model. Your input and suggestions are welcome, as always. We look
forward to working together to continue to reduce barriers of access to
e-content in our community.
Don
Don Hamparian
Sr. Product Manager
Identity Management and EZproxy
OCLC
614.764.6017 (w)
614.975.5750 (m)
On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 10:24 PM, Riley Childs wrote:
> I never thought about this before, but it makes perfect sense, it is
> impossible for the only product in the industry to maintain a perpetual
> licensing model, EZProxy is the only one stop shop of its kind, and that is
> exactly the reason an alternative is needed. Not because EZProxy is lacking
> or expensive (it is a great product for the price) but as many others have
> said: it is the only one, service vendors require EZProxy, we need to
> change that purely for the sake of improvement, if the OCLC has incentive
> to improve it will, but right now it has the market cornered, leaving no
> need for inovation.
>
> This was basically what everyone has said (I think!) and there are valid
> points for staying with EZProxy or switching, but the one that is most
> pressing: monopoly, EZProxy is a unique animal, and who knows? $500/year
> today $1000/year tomorrow, maybe even client access licenses? That is the
> real reason an alternative is needed now.
>
> I hope this makes sense
> //Riley
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Feb 3, 2014, at 4:21 PM, "Peter Murray"
> wrote:
> >
> > I think it also useful to think about this from the service provider's
> perspective. There have been a few calls for enhancements/fixes in this
> thread, but with no source of ongoing revenue (for self-hosted
> installations, at least) I don't know how we can realistically expect the
> service provider to devote resources to those enhancements/fixes. The $500
> paid for the perpetual right to run the software is good if you never
> expect the software to change, particularly for something that has the
> market saturation that EZproxy does (since there is a decreasing number of
> new subscribers to pay the bills for added development). The same could be
> said for paying the way of the technical writers to write documentation for
> the new features added to the system.
> >
> >
> > Peter
> > --
> > Peter Murray
> > Assistant Director, Technology Services Development
> > LYRASIS
> > peter.mur...@lyrasis.org
> > +1 678-235-2955
> > 800.999.8558 x2955
>
