rick@sbcs.UUCP (Rick Spanbauer) (07/19/87)
With respect to my recent posting regarding NeWS on the Amiga, it seems
that some folks have already interpreted the posting in the wrong way.
Pls let it be known that:
1. I am strongly pro-Sun.
2. After having played with NeWS, I admit to being a reformed X addict.
Lastly, why is everyone busy bashing Sun? NeWS is a propreitary software
product that they are trying to sell just as Manx sells compilers, EA sells
games, etc. Never mind that NeWS is competing with a free, public domain
window system - this is simply irrelevant. What it boils down to is that if
you want to do the things that NeWS is better at than X (running over thin
wires, PostScript programmablility, etc), then you have to pay Sun. I don't
have a problem with this, why do you?
Rick
PS. Anyone have ideas about a good thin wire protocol for use of NeWS over
telephone lines? Already know about SLIP - I'm looking for something
with less overhead.gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (07/21/87)
The right person to make a statement on this is Smita Deshpande, the
Product Manager for NeWS at Sun. If you really care, you can call her
at +1 415 960 1300, the main Sun switchboard. But she's probably not there
now (at midnight :-) so I will do the best I can.
Last I heard, NeWS source sold for about $20-25K. (I don't have a copy.)
You can get binaries for your Sun-3 for $100 (I *do* have a copy.)
There is probably some deal where universities can get cheap sources,
the same way they can get cheap Unix sources from Sun, AT&T, and others.
If you want to distribute NeWS binaries to your customers, Sun also
wants a royalty, I suspect well under $100 per copy. (After all, they
want NeWS to succeed and spread, not die of mis-pricing.)
Probably Rick's Amiga port was done from university NeWS sources, since
he is at Stony Brook. I strongly doubt that the university license for
NeWS gives any kind of binary distribution capability, though I could see
letting them pass their changes to other source customers (same as
Unix). If somebody wants to sell this to the Amiga community, they
will have to buy a commercial license at $~25K and sign a distribution
agreement and send royalties in to Sun. I'm sure Sun would love to have
somebody do this and sell NeWS on the Amiga.
What Rick has done in a week is often called a "proof of concept".
That is, he showed it's pretty easy to port NeWS to the Amiga. I'm sure
that to make it a shippable, useful product there are another few months
of work in there somewhere :-). Things like documentation, making it
use the Amiga hardware, making it work with old Amiga applications,
providing an interface so NeWS applications can run on the Amiga rather
than just on nearby Unix machines, etc. Then comes support, distribution,
marketing, ...
Realize that a company that wanted to do this had better figure out
ahead of time whether they can pay $25K plus a few months work by one
or a few people plus royalties to Sun, and sell enough copies to Amiga
customers to make that all back plus a good profit. Would *you* buy
NeWS for your Amiga, knowing that no native Amiga graphics applications
run under it yet? Knowing that it takes all the small RAM that
Commodore saw fit to design into your machine? How many of you have
Ethernets or TCP/IP on your Amigas anyway?
I don't think that Sun has anything to fear from Commodore; they aren't
"withholding NeWS from Amigas" because they feel threatened. Sun has
gotten more crazy as it gets older but it's not that crazy yet.
Commodore seems to cripple every product they build so far, why should
the next one be different? Suns run real live Berkeley Unix, with all
the commercial and PD software and experienced programmers that comes
with that, on fast machines, with fast standard expansion buses, with
screens 4x as big, that network like crazy, and start at $5K+. How is
the videogame machine that became the Amiga a threat to Sun? (Flames
by email, let's not ignite the net.)
--
{dasys1,ncoast,well,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@postgres.berkeley.edu
Alt.all: the alternative radio of the Usenet.