So what's the price point that EZProxy needs to climb to make it more
realistic to put resources into an alternative.  At $500/year, I don't even
have to think about justifying it.  At 1% (or less) of the cost of position
with little to no prior experience needed, it doesn't make a lot of sense
to invest in an open source alternative, even on a campus that heavily uses
Shibboleth.

Tim


On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Ross Singer <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Not only that, but it's also expressly designed for the purpose of reverse
> proxying subscription databases in a library environment.  There are tons
> of things vendors do that would be incredibly frustrating to get working
> properly in Squid, nginx, or Apache that have already been solved by
> EZProxy.  Which is self-fulfilling: vendors then cater to what EZProxy does
> (rather than improving access to their resources).
>
> Art Rhyno used to say that the major thing that was inhibiting the
> widespread adoption of Shibboleth was how simple and cheap EZProxy was.  I
> think there is a lot of truth to that.
>
> -Ross.
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]
> >wrote:
>
> > > EZproxy is a self-installing statically compiled single binary
> download,
> > > with a built-in administrative interface that makes most common
> > > administrative tasks point-and-click, that works on Linux and Windows
> > > systems, and requires very little in the way of resources to run.  It
> > also
> > > has a library of a few hundred vendor stanzas that can be copied and
> > pasted
> > > and work the majority of the time.
> > >
> > > To successfully replace EZproxy in this setting, it would need to be
> > > packaged in such a way that it is equally easy to install and maintain,
> > and
> > > the library of vendor stanzas would need to be developed as apache
> conf.d
> > > files.
> > >
> >
> > This. The real gain with EZProxy is that configuring it is crazy easy.
> You
> > just drop it in and run it -- it's feasible for someone with no
> experience
> > in proxying or systems administration to get it operational in a few
> > minutes. That is why I think virtualizing a system that makes accessing
> the
> > more powerful features of EZProxy easy is a good alternative.
> >
> > kyle
> >
>



-- 
Tim McGeary
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