gnu@sun.uucp (John Gilmore) (06/05/84)
People are still mistaking "car" options for "software" options. It costs money to put an air conditioner in a car. Given that either you're AT&T and have paid many times over for your investment in Unix, or you're an OEM and buy a complete binary Unix license from AT&T, your development costs do not increase when you ship everyone the whole shebang. If the end user never runs the C compiler you shipped, they will not be demanding C compiler support from you either. Now, it will take more media space (tape, floppy, or disk) to ship the whole thing, but the customer can always delete (or avoid loading) the parts they don't use. If they want to run all the software, they can buy more disks (from you). If the total price of the "base" system plus all the options adds up to a competitive price for a complete system, I'll believe that partitioning is an OK thing. But I haven't seen a system yet where that was true; they tend to charge a "whole system" price for the base, and make a killing on the extras like the C compiler.