Supplying free telephone technical support for a free product is history at AICS Research, which has changed its support arrangements for its QCTerm HP 3000 terminal emulator. The support fees will be the first money the company will collect for the product. Bug reports will continue to be free. AICS has offered the software as a free, downloadable product for more than two years, revising the Windows client to meet changing Visual Basic capabilities and adding functionality like cutting and pasting items into a forms mode page like those found in NMMGR or VPlus forms. AICS founder Wirt Atmar said in a posting that he guesses there are close to 10,000 people using QCTerm, and much of the support traffic now doesn’t cover problems with the emulator. But some of the prospects for using the software say they can’t implement the product without showing management a paid support plan. At about the same time, Atmar said he’s decided support requests are most likely to be corner cases, so AICS is suspending free telephone support for the product. The latest 0.9p revision does fix problems with stripping nulls from escape sequences, as well as details like allowing programs that use the start-of-text pointer to operate correctly. But he said more and more support calls include questions like “How do I sign on to the 3000?”

“Because the problems we’re seeing in QCTerm are now becoming not only rarer and rarer but also more and more obscure, we’re going to start disallowing support phone calls,” Atmar said in an announcement over the Internet. “Problems that are being reported with QCTerm now are third-order tall-grass problems and are generally quite obscure. But don’t take that to mean that we aren’t extremely interested in making QCTerm perfect. If you find something that isn’t working properly, please by all means report it.”

Companies which need a product with a license agreement for support can now pay AICS Research $1,500 per year for QCTerm and the product’s developing Van Gogh forms mode. Atmar said those “products will always be free and distributable to as many people as you wish. It’s just that some organizations seem to feel more comfortable if they can pay for the guarantee of support, and we’re pleased to offer that level of service.”