Even with razor thin budgets, this is a no brainer.  May they need decide
between buying 10 new books or license EZProxy?  Possibly, but if they have
a need for EZProxy, that's still a no brainer - until a solid OSS
replacement that includes as robust a developer /support community comes
around.  But again, at $500/year, I don't see a lot of incentive to invest
in such a project.


On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Riley Childs <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> But there are places on a razor thin budget, and things like this throw
> them off ball acne
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Jan 31, 2014, at 3:32 PM, "Tim McGeary" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > 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
> > [log in to unmask]
> > GTalk/Yahoo/Skype/Twitter: timmcgeary
> > 484-294-7660 (cell)
>



-- 
Tim McGeary
[log in to unmask]
GTalk/Yahoo/Skype/Twitter: timmcgeary
484-294-7660 (cell)