"We had purchased two software packages several years ago from Haestad Methods, before they were bought out by Bentley," writes an engineer for a municipal public works department. "On one of them - an hydraulic design product called Flowmaster - we had not elected to extend the client service agreement. We then discovered our IT department had accidentally overwritten some of the Flowmaster licensing files, and we found out from Bentley that they wouldn't give us a copy of those without having their client service agreement."

Bentley certainly isn't the only software company that might require a customer to renew their maintenance agreement in such circumstances, but there was going to be more to it in that. "We also had a paid-up copy of another Haestad Methods product called PondPack," the engineer wrote. "They wouldn't let us purchase a new copy of Flowmaster, or get the service agreement on it, unless we also renewed it for PondPack. They informed us that Bentley has a 'Cover One Cover All' policy which apparently requires us to purchase a service agreement for all of their programs we own if we want to cover any of them."

As his department had planned to renew the PondPack maintenance anyway, they were still willing to go ahead and get a year's worth of Bentley's Select service agreement for both packages, at a cost of around $1,200. "However, after we determined that we wanted to cover the two programs that this department had previously purchased, Bentley Systems then informed us that the city also had three old copies of their Microstation program," the reader wrote. It turned out that the city's police department had two licenses for the Microstation CAD program, and a third city department had the other. "Although the Microstation copies were purchased by different departments, Bentley said that these would also need to either be covered at a cost of $625 per license per year or these licenses would need to be surrendered."

In an e-mail to the engineer's department, Bentley explained its policy. "The Select program is a cover one cover all program," the Bentley representative's e-mail read. "All licenses must be covered. The best way to decide whether or not you are going to surrender the unused licenses is this. If you will be using them at all in the next five years, you will want to cover them. If not, surrender them and pay only the Select on the others. By surrendering, you will lose the ability to ever upgrade or cover that license. In essence, you are promising us you will never use it again. I would strongly urge you to cover them. What would you like to do?"

The Microstation licenses aren't being used all that much, the engineer says, so the city is certainly not inclined to spend over $1,800 on Select agreements for them. "We don't use them very much anymore, so we've decided they are not worth the cost to keep them current," he wrote. If Bentley doesn't reconsider its position, "surrender" is therefore the only logical option. "It looks like we will surrender the Microstation licenses -- especially since their function can be handled by other programs like AutoCad," the engineer says.

But while that may be what the city has to do, the engineer's colleagues in the other departments are not very happy about having to give up the Microstation licenses that they paid for. After all, separate departments bought separate products from what at the time were separate software companies -- why should they now have to make the kind of choice Bentley is leaving them with? As with so many other software companies we've seen, Bentley's maintenance program seems to be more about maintaining company revenues than customer satisfaction.

What do you think of Bentley's "cover-one, cover-all" policy? Write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com or post your comments below.