cjs@po.CWRU.Edu (Christopher J. Seline) (03/02/91)
Subject_was: Price of FTP Inc.'s Stuff
Reply-To: cjs@po.CWRU.Edu (Christopher J. Seline)
References: <9103010424.aa16909@louie.udel.edu> <usc!cs.utexas.edu!helios!ewillis@UCSD.EDU>
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
In a previous article:
jbvb@FTP.COM ("James B. Van Bokkelen")
WRITES:
Why pay when there is freeware? Well, a support group
is one thing, but another is that a commercial company
can hire people to do hard things (put the protocol stack
in a TSR, write an RFC 1001/1002 NETBIOS or a DOS I/O
redirector) that appear to beyond the scope of most of
the plans people have for the non-commercial packages.
Maintaining freeware is usually a labor of love, and many
of the laborers have burned out or gotten their degrees
and moved on. I respect and appreciate their
contribution, because it all advances networking in
general, but I do see them as addressing a different
specific need than we do.
As a victim of a non-commercial package here at CWRU let me tell
you I'd love it if we had FTP Inc's TCP/IP.
Our (my) biggest problem is user programs -- users can't write
program; so, unless you can convince the powers that be to provide
a program you are out-of-luck. Why?
(1) The (local) TCP/IP calls are undocumented; and
(2) our software is derived from Stanford's proprietary code
and therefore students and faculty do not have access to the
code; therefore they can't read the code to figure-out how to
make the calls themselves.
Of course, if I desperately needed TCP/IP I could use someone
else's package (or purchase FTP's) BUT THAT WOULD MEAN THE PROGRAM
COULD ONLY BE DISTRIBUTED TO USERS CAPABLE OF LOADING THIS 'OTHER
TCP/IP TSR.' WHICH (in an environment like CWRU) IS DARN FEW.