rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) (07/01/91)
When I buy SCO Unix, DEC VMS, or any of a number of other vendors' operating systems, included in the price of the software is a complete set of documentation on both the system commands and the library calls available to application developers. The library-calls doc from SCO comes in a compressed form and takes up no more than a couple of megabytes of storage. IBM's AIX policy is to make a CD-ROM of all this doc available free of charge, but I'm not aware of any way to get a copy of it on tape (without an extra cost). My pre-loaded Model 520 came with 'info' on shell commands only, and no printed manuals whatsoever. It is my belief that, if this is true, IBM will have a harder time getting developers to write AIX applications than SCO (for example) might have. So my question is this: can I indeed get hold of the library-calls doc free of charge on tape or diskette? If not, how might one go about trying to persuade IBM this isn't an especially wise policy? If yes, how might one convince IBM to automatically ship it with the AIX system? -rich
benson@odi.com (Benson I. Margulies) (07/01/91)
Every third party of significance will port to the RS/6000 regardless of how IBM distributes documentation. IBM is, so put it mildly, a very significant force in the industry. Would you skip an RS/6000 port and risk missing the boat? After all, a paper doc set is only a few hundred dollars, which is peanuts compared to a 530. Furthermore, if you ask your SE very nicely, they may very well order you manuals for free. -- Benson I. Margulies
benson@odi.com (Benson I. Margulies) (07/01/91)
and I forgot to add: if you have the disk space, and the release tapes (surely you spent the ~$200 on the release tapes in case of disaster) you can always load the rest of the docset. All of the info explorer doc for commands and subroutines is on the release tapes. -- Benson I. Margulies
pfink@watson.ibm.com (Paul Fink) (07/01/91)
In article <8146@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>, rbraun@spdcc.COM (Rich Braun) writes: |> When I buy SCO Unix, DEC VMS, or any of a number of other vendors' |> operating systems, included in the price of the software is a complete |> set of documentation on both the system commands and the library calls |> available to application developers. .... |> IBM's AIX policy is to make a CD-ROM of all this doc available free of |> charge, but I'm not aware of any way to get a copy of it on tape (without |> an extra cost). My pre-loaded Model 520 came with 'info' on shell |> commands only, and no printed manuals whatsoever. .... |> So my question is this: can I indeed get hold of the library-calls |> doc free of charge on tape or diskette? .... |> -rich I can't answer your question. I have no knowledge of IBM marketing. But I am curious, is the problem that you don't have a CD-ROM? If you do then dd works fine. If you have the disk space you can copy the Info CD to disk. Its much faster and you can even NFS mount it. You can even put it on diskettes, many, many, many diskettes. *** NOTE: I have no knowledge if this violates licensing or not. ***