We have had a dwindling supply of Quark volume licenses for 10+ years. We are currently on Quark 9.x and use QLA. Very few of our designers prefer to use it now, but I like to keep some available to open old files or just in case a client brings in a Quark document.
I decided to look into the costs to upgrade our 9.x licenses to the current version 10.x and was told by Quark I could not. Instead I was told Quark only offers "maintenance" now for their volume license customers. When I asked how the maintenance worked I was basically told that we have to pay Quark a yearly fee in order to use their software and after the year is up the Quark software will quit working unless we continue to pay.
I have never seen "maintenance" described that way. That sounds much more like a "subscription" (ie Adobe) or a "rental" fee. We are very against the idea of subscriptions due to the vastly increased costs. This is one of the reasons we have turned away from Adobe and looked into upgrading our Quark licenses. Now if they are essentially the same as Adobe, there is no real reason for us to consider going back to Quark and upgrading the Quark licenses.
The Quark customer service person was very polite about it, but I wanted to double-check this with others and make sure I understood the rep correctly in that:
1. Quark does not offer any volume licensing, but only "maintenance" plans that will give you the latest version of Quark but your existing software quits working when you quit paying for the "maintenance".
2. Quark does not offer any "maintenance" that is concurrent licensing, but only a "per seat" basis.
3. Even if you pay for the "maintenance" you must still use a local QLA server to manage the licenses.
Does that sound correct? Or did I misunderstand the customer rep?