Re: demand for Kawa support?

[Jocelyn Paine <popx at pop3 dot ifs dot org dot uk>]

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Per Bothner wrote:

> Jocelyn Paine wrote:
> 
> >However, the terms suggested are way beyond what a UK
> >university would pay for per-user support, unless perhaps the system is
> >being used by every student in a department.
> >
> To make sure there are no misunderstandings:  The price of $2400/year is
> per "contact point", not per user.  You can support a 100 users on that, as
> long as none of them bother me directly.  Instead you would be responsible
> for filtering out the trivial questions, reproducing the problem, and
> submitting a coherent bug report or question.  From a commercial company
> if you tried to support a 100 programmers using a single contact point, you
> might go crazy - or I might conclude you're abusing the deal, and ask you
> to pay more.  In an academic setting, I'd give you some more leeway, but it
> would still depend on how well you pre-filter any problems from your users.
>
Understood, but I was being a bit rhetorical when I talked about 'every
student in a department'. One might wish it otherwise, but I've never had
to teach or support Kawa for any other user but me. In all the projects
I've done, there'd have been just one programmer (me) who would have
needed the support, because he's the guy who discovered Kawa a year or two
ago, liked it, decided it had certain semantic (albeit not ergonomic)
benefits over Java, experimented in using it as his implementation
language, and then realised a month later that despite all its advantages
there might still be times when he had a demo due the next day and just
could not and Could Not and COULD NOT get this thing to work... [Typically
British descriptions of ensuing intestinal disorder omitted for sake of
decency in international emails.]

Seriously, since you mention 'per contact point', are your rates based on
the assumption that the subscriber is a teacher passing on queries from a
class of 50 novice users, or a single developer? It might be good to have
different scales for each.

> >So my point is that in this kind of academic use of Kawa, where a
> >department gets most of its money from one-off grants, and doesn't have
> >much recurrent fundung to cover overheads, Per's terms are unlikely to be
> >administratively feasible. But buying support a month at a time might be
> >
> Monthly payments of $200 would be acceptable, though not my preference.
> 
In your place, not my preference either. But I already know, having asked
them this morning, that the department can't afford a year's sub., so I
shall ask them about the other. Others here may be in the same situation.

> >It would also be useful to have an estimate of roughly how many hours of
> >support the $2400 would buy; it's the kind of thing one has to fill in in
> >the budget form when making applications.
> >
> I figure if it works out to less than $50/hour, then it isn't worth my 
> time.  So
> if you need a number, put down 48.  (Of course my normal non-Kawa consulting
> rate would be higher than that!)
> 
I think US rates must be higher than UK ones, but this gives me something
useful to go on. Thanks a lot. Cheers.

Jocelyn Paine
http://www.ifs.org.uk/~popx/
07768 524 091