rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) (09/25/90)
I think this is a good idea. I see however one problem, and that is that NeXT and the Users are bound to be subject to some arbitrary pricing strategies of 3rd party developers. There is no way of forcing Lotus. Asthon Tate and Informix e.g. to go for the same price and licensing agreement. Then, as soon as a company realizes that their product is wanted, they start asking outrageous prices and NeXT would be forced to pay or give up their nice system. The bottom line, if NeXT can't find very good lawers and make very good contracts this is doomed to fail. The other possibility is to develop all the software internally or buy the rights. But then this costs even more and NeXT could give away everything for free then.. So as far as the business world goes, I don't think this will work out in the long run. Just look at the new cataloge: there are prices for software from 20$ to over 40000$, and higher prices do not in correlate with better quality. Given the 40000$ price, NeXT would have to charge us 500000$ for interface builder and AppInspector and all that. But they don't. I can't thank NeXT enough for being relatively sane with pricing. (only exceptions being SIMMs and HDs). Ronald ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Bernhard Shaw | rca@cs.brown.edu or antony@browncog.bitnet