Re: educational pricing?

[spector@cs.UMD.EDU (Lee Spector)]

philip@Pescadero.Stanford.EDU writes:
>A while back, someone asked about educational pricing for MACL. I know
>universities can buy site licences, but this isn't suitable for everyone
>(e.g., only a small group needs MACL).
> 
>Was there an answer to this question? I don't remember seeing one (though
>some of my mail has been lost).

I was the one who asked that question.  I also wrote to Harvey Alcabes
(ALCABES@AppleLink.Apple.COM), who is Apple's Lisp Project Manager.

Unfortunately, the core of the answer was, "I am hopeful that
we will be able to offer student prices eventually, but I'm sure it will be
several months at least before that happens (if ever)."

In your case, however, a site license may be appropriate; I am under the
impression that they can be economical even for fairly small groups.

Individual students who have invested in personal copies of MACL are not
so lucky.  While my lab (which participates in a university-wide site
license) can upgrade its MACL to 2.0 for $35 (which includes disks AND
the manual), I will have to pay $250 to upgrade my personal copy. Perhaps
the full cost to the lab will be $70, since we are really talking about
two upgrades (1.3.2 -> 2.0b, 2.0b -> 2.0). Nonetheless, the difference
between these prices is non-trivial to students. It seems to me that
Apple might actually MAKE money by offering a student price of, say, $100
for the upgrade, since many students will probably forgo the upgrade and
use only site-licensed copies at school.

Please note that I'm not arguing that students deserve discounts; however,
I do believe that student discounts are a good idea for various reasons,
some of which have been articulated by Apple itself.

Anyway, it doesn't appear that student prices for MACL or for the MCL 2.0
upgrade are likely, but it's always possible that more input from the user
community would have some effect...

 -Lee (spector@cs.umd.edu)