>This is where the crunch lies. I am, for example, a private NON-academic
>crystallographer... and there is no allowance for people like me.
If you are doing non-profit academic research (even privately) you can
still probably get the individual MS-DOS ICSD-CD, and that is cheaper than
most Microsoft products :-) If there are several users who are affiliated
with a lab. it probably makes more sense to buy the site license, which
now comes with a nice WWW interface rather than MS-DOS :-)
>people in academic institutions seem to forget that there is a world
>outside their protected space.
Perhaps, but people in academic institutions don't set the prices - and
don't usually have to worry about covering costs. (And please make
sure that you are quoting real numbers from the supplier of ICSD).
>Can anybody explain to me the factor of 10 difference in price for
>ICSD data between academic and industrial users.
The I.U.Cr. negotiated a particularly good price for the personal PC-DOS
license on the grounds that it would encourage many more people to buy it.
The more users the lower the price (assuming they actually pay, and
don't simply copy the personal CD or put it on a public machine :-).
It seems unfair to use this low price as a measure of what industrial
labs might pay.
I can only suggest that you might obtain a better deal if a few labs. get
together and negotiate the price. Whole countries such as the UK and the
Netherlands seem to have managed this (at least for academic users).
>This, by the way, is the
>reason why there are so many requests these days - the market reacts
>to such humbug.
I can understand the requests, but I don't think you can call that a 'market'.
Alan Hewat, ILL Grenoble, FRANCE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tel (33) 4.76.20.72.13
ftp://ftp.ill.fr/pub/dif fax (33) 4.76.48.39.06 http://www.ill.fr/dif/
