stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne) (07/09/90)
In article <9007061606.AA10534@lance> jimf@SABER.COM writes: [Two sets of warranties and tyranslations to english that say "the stuff on the disks should do what the stuff in the books says it does, if it doesn't the best you can get from us is what you payed for, even if the stuff on the disks destroys all sorts of things"] >These statements are very standard amongst commercial software. > >GNU has no warranty. They don't promise that their stuff does >anything in particular and if you loose something, they're not going >to pay for it. > >I don't see a whole lot of difference in their warranties except that >with GNU they won't repay your purchase price (which you didn't pay >anyway). Your only guarantee you have is that a for-profit company >probably won't stay in business long if their product doesn't work >(although there are obvious exceptions). Given the success to failure >rate in our business, this isn't saying much. "Real software" (stuff that you pay for) does come with more. It comes with a number to call for help. (in the PC world it also is less likely to have a virus, or be a Trojan house, but that's another matter) "Real software" also tends to be easyer to install, and tends not to need to be compiled for hours... Thes things give "real software" a edge in the "real world" (I guess that's why they are both described as "real") Now free software doesn't allways have to be at this disadvantage, that is if it becomes non-free. There are people who can provide the same (or better) support for free software as you get with "real software", the same people would probbly compile & install it for you. For a price (prob less then "real software" costs). (I know I could do this, now all I need is someone to pay me...) This doesn't belong in comp.windows.x anymore, so I'm redirecting follow-ups to gnu.misc.discuss. -- stripes@eng.umd.edu "Security for Unix is like Josh_Osborne@Real_World,The Mutitasking for MS-DOS" "The dyslexic porgramer" - Kevin Lockwood "Don't try to change C into some nice, safe, portable programming language with all sharp edges removed, pick another language." - John Limpert
chan@hpfcmgw.HP.COM (Chan Benson) (07/19/90)
> Without a doubt the three most significant advances in software in the > past century have been Unix, X, and TCP/IP (the latter two attributable, > in part, to Unix). "Without a doubt"? "Without a doubt"? No doubt at all? Not even a doubt created by the fact that Unix systems probably make up less than a tenth of all computers ever sold? Doesn't FORTRAN even get an honorable mention? > Each of those systems was available in source form at little or no cost. Well, I don't know what the original Unix licensing fees were, but a normal person can hardly get Unix source these days for "little or no cost". -- Chan
mouse@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (der Mouse) (07/21/90)
>> [...] Unix, X, and TCP/IP [...] >> Each of those systems was available in source form at little or no >> cost. > Well, I don't know what the original Unix licensing fees were, but a > normal person can hardly get Unix source these days for "little or no > cost". (That's one of the things that's wrong with what currently goes by the name UNIX. But that's off the track.) The UNIX that caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is, *was* source-available essentially free. (And now that it's become widespread, AT&T's got everybody else intimidated or bought off.[%]) der Mouse old: mcgill-vision!mouse new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu [%] So I'm in an obnoxious mood, but that's how I see it. The little fish can't possibly afford to fight AT&T in court even if they have a won case, and the big ones are all "cooperating" in "joint efforts" of one sort or another.
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (07/23/90)
>The UNIX that caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is, >*was* source-available essentially free. To *some* customers. Commercial source licenses for V6, for example, were somewhere in the $20K US range - or does costing $20K US count as "essentially free"? The "UNIX that caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is" was V7; that was the first one that appeared on *lots* of boxes. I suspect the availability of cheap *binary* sublicenses had more to do with that than the availability of cheap source licenses....
sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden) (07/23/90)
In article <3725@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes: >>The UNIX that caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is, >>*was* source-available essentially free. > >To *some* customers. Commercial source licenses for V6, for example, >were somewhere in the $20K US range - or does costing $20K US count as >"essentially free"? > >The "UNIX that caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is" >was V7; that was the first one that appeared on *lots* of boxes. I >suspect the availability of cheap *binary* sublicenses had more to do >with that than the availability of cheap source licenses.... Perhaps. But it was the easy availability of Unix in academic environments and subsequent exposure of a large number of programmers to Unix systems via the Berkeley distribution (which was source), that created the demand. That, coupled with the demonstrations by Sun and Apollo that Unix could be a viable commercial operating system (even if you did need to have a systems programming staff to keep it running), is probably what forced the rest of the industry to concede. ATT didn't start charging standard commercial rates for Unix until well after BSD hit the campuses and I think what hurt, there, was not so much the price (have you tried to get a source VMS license?), but the cost for derivative distributions. In fact, although I consider ATT's licensing policies to be reasonably competitive with the industry (for Unix, anyway), I think that their approach was errant for philosophical rather than financial reasons and is what led to proliferation of the two Unixes. Another interesting thing about the Berkeley distribution was the number of people who became, essentially, expert systems and applications programmers in the absence of nothing other than the standard set of ATT->Berkeley reference manuals, an article in the Bell Systems Technical Journal, and Kernighan and Ritchie. On our own campus, among the C/Unix programmers, there was probably accrued over 300 man-years experience with Unix before the first formal course in Unix or C programming. The availability of the network contributed, substantially, to this, I am convinced. This is, of course, highly speculative. It would make for an interesting social study (perhaps NSF would fund it), for someone to seriously examine what the social and commercial effect was of that first little DARPA grant to Berkeley to develop the BSD distribution. The knowledge from such a study might be quite valuable to the industry and would (IMHO) cause a lot of people to rethink what their roles should be in the commercial side of this industry. Sean McLinden Decision Systems Laboratory University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden) (07/24/90)
In article <1990Jul23.142314.6541@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> I wrote: >This is, of course, highly speculative. It would make for an interesting >social study (perhaps NSF would fund it), for someone to seriously examine >what the social and commercial effect was of that first little DARPA grant >to Berkeley to develop the BSD distribution. The knowledge from such a >study might be quite valuable to the industry and would (IMHO) cause a >lot of people to rethink what their roles should be in the commercial side >of this industry. I have been giving this a little more thought, and suspect that it might make for a rather fascinating case study. As a prelude to such a study it would be important to collect a lot of facts (I have already been corrected on a few), as well as some opinions from many of the people who were part of the Unix development process. Given that a large number of these people frequent these news groups I would be interested to know (by mail, since the rules of the net preclude me discussing this, here), if there would be some sort of interest in a discussion of Unix development history (in another newgroup, or a new newsgroup, like "comp.unix.history"). Some of this does appear in the literature, but not in the detail or with the color that would be necessary to do a real study. Please don't follow up to this, here, I've already taken liberties with this newgroup in following up to my own posting which is, decidedly, far afield from the original topic. Your unwilling indulgence is appreciated. Sean McLinden Decision Systems Laboratory University of Pitsburgh Medical Center
mls@cbnewsm.att.com (mike.siemon) (07/24/90)
I think people have forgotten *why* UNIX was cheap to schools and, for a long time not merely expensive but *unavailable* commerically -- consent decrees about AT&T not going into the software/computer business. A *research* effort was smuggled into *research* sites; and the rest is history. Now, if AT&T had been *allowed* to sell software, who knows what would have happened? (probably, UNIX would have bloated up into an impossibility far sooner :-)) The early BSD releases were also complicated by entanglements with the baroque structure American government has become. -- Michael L. Siemon We must know the truth, and we must m.siemon@ATT.COM love the truth we know, and we must ...!att!sfsup!mls act according to the measure of our love. standard disclaimer -- Thomas Merton
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (07/25/90)
>Perhaps. But it was the easy availability of Unix in academic environments >and subsequent exposure of a large number of programmers to Unix systems >via the Berkeley distribution (which was source), that created the demand. >That, coupled with the demonstrations by Sun and Apollo that Unix could be >a viable commercial operating system The version of UNIX that "caught on like wildfire, that made it the success it is", was available inexpensively source form only to a subset of its ultimate customer base. This is unlike X, which is available in the form you get it in from MIT in source form to anybody with 1) the disk space to store it and 2) the ability to read the tape or FTP it, with the only charge being the media/transport charge. I don't know how much difference this difference makes, but the cases of UNIX and X *do* differ in that regard. >ATT didn't start charging standard commercial rates for Unix until well >after BSD hit the campuses What are you defining as "standard commercial rates" here? Commercial UNIX source licenses cost big bucks even before VAXes existed (although BSD, as in "1BSD" and "2BSD" certainly existed during part of that time; I suspect by "BSD" you're thinking of "4BSD", though). "Big bucks", as I remember, was on the order of $20K for the first V7 license at a site, although subsequent machines may have cost less. Commercial UNIX binary sublicenses first arrived in the V7 era, before 3BSD or 4BSD existed; they were considerably cheaper than the source licenses. Without that provision, I suspect UNIX would have had a hard time catching on as a commercial OS; most customers wouldn't be able to get the cheap academic licenses.