Re: [alma-sw-ssr] Offline Requirements v3.1

[Steve Scott <scott@ovro.caltech.edu>]

I would like to explain why I'm quibbling over the "nominal cost"
wording in the offline requirements doc. It is not unusual for the cost
of commercial software to individual institutions to dominate the choice
of buy or build (for whatever reasons). These total costs may be
completely out of proportion to the cost of building software - say
saving 20 institutions a $3k license each verses building $10M of
software. The evaluation of an implementation should look at "total
cost", as well performance, convenience, operations, maintainability,
etc. Given the comments of Steve Myers and Bryan Butler, a commercial
option may not be adequate, but the evaluation should not be biased by
giving undue weight to the license costs for individual institutions.
There are administrative and operational alternatives available to deal
with this issue.

While there is nothing that meets the requirements better than writing
your own software, there is also nothing that is more expensive.

Cheers,
Steve (Scott)