IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR ATHENA APPLIXWARE USERS         3/20/09

Applixware will cease to be available on Athena as of 8/1/09 when our
current license term expires. Not renewing the license is being done
to reduce duplications of service and save costs in these difficult
economic times. The license fee is substantial and the user base has
diminished significantly in recent years, to the point where we no
longer can justify maintaining it on Athena.

We suggest that you make the transition to Open Office, which has
been the primary office suite on Athena for many years. It is possible
to convert Applix data formats to ones that Open Office can read by
using the File -> Export feature in Applixware. Generally converting
documents to Microsoft formats should  work, as Open Office can read most
of these.

For Words text documents, Rich Text Format export is known to
work. Spreadsheets can be exported as XLS, and graphics/presentations
can be exported as one of the graphics image formats (there seems to
be a bug that breaks PowerPoint 97 export in Graphics; it may work in
Presents). Please note that documents containing macros may be
problematic.

Another option is to download the Linux Applixware 6.0 Home User
Edition from the VistaSource web site at
http://www.vistasource.com/en/download.php. VistaSource is allowing
users to use this for free for personal use on a single machine. It
appears to be fully functional though you will need to run a license
server on the machine you install it on. It has been verified to work
on Fedora 10 and on Ubuntu Intrepid; we haven't tested it on other
Linux distributions. Please note that we can't offer support for such
installations and that we don't know how long this version will
continue to be available.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience this may cause to our user
community.  You can send questions or comments to the 3partysw@mit.edu
mailing list.