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.