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Comment by rat9988 | Hacker News Reader

From a different point of view, I don't see using PR to have lower fees very ethical. It looks to me like "lower our fees, or we are gonna trash you in our PR, and you know we have a good reputation".

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That seems something of a double standard, companies are encouraged to use any legal means possible to improve profits, but customers need to stay silent about poor terms?

The parent didn't encourage companies to use any legal means necessary. You can't know their stance about this.

What's unethical about "if you do something we don't like, we're going to talk about it"?

What would the more ethical alternative be? To just take the deal on offer or silently move on?

I don't think that really holds water. The ethical thing for the researchers is to drive down costs everywhere they can to get the most money spent on research. M$oft wants to maximize it's profits and is negotiating from a position of strength knowing that big enterprise integrations can't just say "f-this, were off to use ubuntu".

Funny how advice on this site is always "Charge what it's worth!" or "Don't be afraid to charge for your product!", unless of course, it's someone who's already made it, like Microsoft, and then it's the tired 20 year old "M$" meme again.

There is a difference between advice for a lifestyle business and critique of a fortune 50 company.

High end tech procurement is more like your average market stall haggling than you might imagine. It tends to be the middle ground that's most stable.

Have you ever negotiated in a contested deal with a big company?

They get way nastier than PR pieces.

I didn't read any trashing. Just a general note that the current commercial terms aren't sustainable for them.

I guess it depends on whether CERN merits academic status or not. If it does, then this is fine. If it doesn't then I agree.

It seems to me that CERN is a research institute but whether that is counted as an academic institution, from a licensing POV, is a different question

As somebody who has worked at research institutes in the US, this comes up a lot. Some companies say that an academic user must have an e-mail address ending in ".edu" (which in the US means a school or university), but others define it more broadly to include non-profit research institutes as well. It gets murky because many research institutes actually have grad students doing their projects there (even if they are officially enrolled at a university elsewhere).

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