Some clarification from Aspera on our DigiDelivery support plans...
 

Folks,

Chris Markle here from Aspera... As you all know, as of December 1st 2008, DigiDelivery customers must have a service agreement in place with Aspera in order to be able to contact us regarding DigiDelivery issues. We also now have hardware support options to extend your warranty and to permit advance replacement in the case of warranty repairs (see http://www.asperasoft.com/products/d...vice_Plans.pdf for details and restrictions).

There have been questions here on the DUC about this and I thought I'd jump in and elaborate. Let me begin by saying that Aspera is not an open source software company that distributes the fruits of our labor for free, nor are we a software charity. We need to be compensated for our work.

I think the key thing to note is that if you want to contact and work with Aspera on DigiDelivery server issues, or client issues on behalf of your users, you'll need a service agreement in place with us. Net-net, if you want our help, have an agreement in place. For only $575 for LT customers and $1,500 for GT customers, you can have Standard support relationship with us, and buy some peace of mind for what is probably a critical delivery service for your company.

As for bug fixes and software updates... This boils down to the server software and the client software.

Server software -- Since Aspera acquired the DigiDelivery product line, we have made three (3) significant software upgrades (May '08 - 2.1.3, August '08 - 2.2.0 and November '08 - 2.2.1) to the server software, and those upgrades have been made available to ALL server customers. These upgrades significantly improved server security, network test functions, relieved the 16GB file size limit and made many other small improvements and fixes. Prior to our involvement, the last minor update was made in March '07 (dealing only with daylight savings time changes) and the last major update was made all the way back in December '05 (fully three years ago)! To date, we have provided these upgrades to all server customers, and it is our current intent to continue to do so. We do reserve the right to change this policy of universal applicability of server updates, but for now, they are available to all.

Client software -- The current client version is 2.1, released by DigiDesign in March '06 (almost three years ago). We recognize that the client we acquired from Digidesign has issues, especially in with respect to OS support and pause/resume. To that end, we are working on a 3.0 client upgrade with many, many bug fixes, and a few of you are already running alpha versions of this. I would expect this new client to be generally available sometime in calendar Q1 '09. We are definitely making this particular release freely available to all client users. As with the server update policy, we do reserve the right to change this policy of universal applicability of client updates, but for now, they are available to all.

I think this generally boils down to: 1. have an agreement in place with us if you want our help with DigiDelivery issues; and 2. we have improved the server software and will be improving the client software, with this being made available to all.

I hope this helps clarify our current position on DigiDelivery support and helps to answer your questions on it.

Chris