Original publication date:
October, 2008
Spotlight on Softshare's Support Maintenance Agreement
It’s no fun reading legalese. Unfortunately, Softshare publishes its share of legal documents, including the Softshare License Agreement, our Standard Terms and Conditions, and our Support Maintenance Agreement.
Most of the terms set forth in these documents never come up. For example, when’s the last time you tried to “Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble” one of Softshare’s software applications? Or orally modify one of our agreements?
But there is one important term in the Support Maintenance Agreement, a document that pertains to users of Softshare Delta and Softshare ECS, that sometimes gets overlooked. It has to do with how long Softshare will support an older version of the software, and it affects both level one and level two maintenance subscribers:
- Level One Subscribers. A level one subscription to Softshare’s support maintenance provides a 50% discount on all major version and product upgrades. You’re not mandated to upgrade to new releases under this plan, but it’s important to know that product defects encountered in older releases will only be resolved in the most current product version. For example, if you’re running Delta 3.0 and encounter a defect that Softshare resolved in the 4.0 release of Delta, you would have to upgrade to 4.0 for resolution; we would not incorporate the fix into an older release.
- Level Two Subscribers. A level two subscription, in addition to providing a 50% discount on all major version and product upgrades, also provides up to 720 minutes of customer support. However, once a new major software release is made available, the previous release is supported for only six months, regardless of how many minutes you may have left on your maintenance term. In other words, if you want free support on an older version of the software, you either need to upgrade to the most current version or incur Softshare’s standard $150 per hour consulting fee. Also, product defects encountered in older releases will only be resolved in the most current product version.
Of course, we strongly recommend that you always upgrade to the most current major release of Delta or ECS in a timely manner in order to take advantage of all the new features and enhancements—and to avoid the above-noted limitations. But if you choose not to, we wanted you to be aware of our formal policy in this regard.