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Date: Mon, 30 Oct 95 16:33 MST
From: ctm@ardi.com (Clifford T. Matthews)
To: executor@nacm.com
Subject: Re: Substitute for donations to ARDI
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>>>>> "Stephen" == Stephen Su <ssu@garnet.berkeley.edu> writes:
Stephen> Rather than donating relatively small amounts of money to
Stephen> ARDI, why doesn't ARDI offer future version upgrade
Stephen> licenses now? That way, people will be buying something,
Stephen> they just won't receive it right away. If the price is
Stephen> discounted over the regular upgrade price, I'm sure many
Stephen> people would be interested. Just a thought.
It's a nice idea, but one we've considered and rejected, for now.
Pricing future upgrades is tricky, and we also want to make sure that
our future upgrade prices will be a real value when they're available,
so if we're not careful we might wind up charging more for a future
upgrade now than when the actual upgrade itself is released. That is
embarrassing and even though it would be done in good faith it leads
to customer grumbling.
If people really want to throw money at us (and we're not asking
anyone to, in fact, we'd prefer that they don't), then consider
purchasing an educational copy for your Alma Mater, be it a grade
school, high school, college, or University. I'm sure that the
recipient of such a gift would be thankful *and* more people would get
exposed to Executor.
Another way to help Executor is to mention that you are running a
program under Executor when you pay the shareware fee for the program.
If you run a piece of freeware often, send the author some e-mail or a
postcard telling her/him that you enjoy her/his software and that
you're running it under Executor on a PC. I'm sure there are hundreds
of shareware and freeware authors who would be delighted to know that
their software runs on a PC. Make sure you give them our URL so that
they can pick up Executor for themselves.
Bottom line, there are an almost unlimited number of worthwhile
charities (the Free Software Foundation comes to mind, since we use so
many of their tools), but ARDI's not one of them. As always, we're
honored by the persistent good will that we receive from our
