dar@belltec.UUCP (Dimitri Rotow) (09/24/88)
There's been some questions recently about "missing" on-line man pages. New for UNIX System V Release 3.0 and subsuquent is AT&T's policy regarding man pages. It used to be that UNIX licensees got the man pages as part of thier UNIX license. AT&T's new policy is to "unbundle" the UNIX man pages and sell them to UNIX distributors at extra cost. The cost is about $10,000 plus a continuing royalty, resulting in a per-copy hit at the end user level of about $45 to $95. We've heard that most people would rather not pop the extra cost associated with the man pages, especially since many people have complained that the man pages just chew up disk space (yes, I know that many people disagree with this). We'd be very interested in hearing how people feel about this issue. If you mail me direct over the next two weeks, I will summarize for the net the results of the vote. Dimitri Rotow ~!pacbell!belltec!dar