brownell@harvard.UUCP (Dave Brownell) (04/20/84)
... too many piracy flames in net.micro ...
How 'bout thinking the fun we'll be having in a few years?
With microprocessor prices going down, and more computers floating
round, the impetus seems to be towards putting lots of them together.
How about distibuted systems based on, say, the AppleBus? If a
company (school, ...) buys one copy of some program and puts it on
their 30 Mbyte file server connected to twenty MacIntoshes, what
should they pay? The fee for one home Mac is too low ... but probably
twenty times that is too high.
Developers could charge a rate dependant on the number of users,
or how much the software is used, but how would that be enforced?
Any takers? What would be fair?
Dave Brownell
{decvax!genrad, allegra!wjh12, ihnp4!harvard} !sequoia!brownelldmt@hocsl.UUCP (04/21/84)
It is a fact that many successful software firms already have faced the problem of multi-user software. Several of which I'm aware have sliding scales, along the lines of: 1 user $x 2-4 users $2x 4-16 users $3x 16-100 users $8x etc. (Number are examples only -- I dont remember any company's exact pricing.) The need arises from time-sharing systems, but I don't see any fundamental difference from the networked software example. The big problem is counting "users". In particular, how do you restrict users on the system who won't want to use the application (therefore you don't want to count them) so that they CAN'T use the application. This is a question that the software vendors consider important, and that will become more important as time passes. Dave Tutelman AT&T IS - Holmdel