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Letter circulating among accounting VARS that deal with Crystal Reports.

Hello All,
 
Since Business Objects acquired Crystal Decisions, they have taken a number of disturbing stances on licensing issues. There are several tangential issues I don't like here, but my primary concern is that we as consultants cannot train other users on Crystal. Here is a quote from the letter from Business Objects:

"The Crystal Reports license agreement does not permit the Crystal Reports software to be used for the purpose of training third parties."

They claim that this is true even if you provide a legal copy of Crystal for every student in your class. They require a $20k fee per classroom for the privilege of holding a training class. This is known as a Classroom License Agreement (CLA).  You can read this in its entirety at Ken Hamady's website.

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 we as application-specific crystal trainers (Exact Macola) are getting a reprieve from the $20k CLA and Business Objects admits they are not going to pursue the additional license fees from application-specific trainers "at this time". You know what that means -- its coming later!  Also of course, several of us support multiple products that use Crystal as a reporting engine (Mas90/200, Goldmine, Syspro, Best Enterprise Suite, SAP Business One, et al).  If Business Objects nails Exact with additional fees in the future, do you think they might hit Best Software too? Or Syspro? Or SAP?  If so do we have to pay again, and again?
 
All in all I am in shock over this entire issue. Even if Business Object's claim that this is all legal is true (highly questionable IMHO), I feel we need to convince them it is bad business on their part to take this position. Crystal Reports' popularity is due to the fact that there are people like us out there creating comfort level with end users in terms of using their product as their reporting solution. I am the last person that wants Microsoft to control any more of my life than they already do, but given this stance by Business Objects, MS SQL Reporting Services is starting to look pretty good. So do R&R Reports and Inpromptu for that matter, both of which I have used and had little problems with, certainly no where near $20k worth of problems.
 
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Best regards to all,
 
Don Gilsdorf
Gain Focus Technologies
www.gainfocus.biz
714.348.0964