spaf@gatech.UUCP (Gene Spafford) (03/15/85)
I got some feedback on on my posting about not being able to afford the cost of the Korn shell or Honey DanBer. It was suggested that we're a "shoestring" operation if we can't afford the few thousand dollars required to license those items. The following was discussed a great deal in net.cse over the past year, so I feel very certain that we're not the only educational institution in this situation: We're a public university. We're a public university in a state that doesn't place a high priority on education (as is the case in most states). We're a public university in a state where the majority of state and federal legislators didn't attend our school -- in fact, most of them attended the rival university across-state. Our student-faculty ratios are too high, our equipment is outdated and undersized, and we don't have any budget for software packages unless some faculty member wants it for study under one of their grants. We're not that different from most other educational institutions around the country. Only a few places have the funds to pay a couple thousand a pop out of petty cash for software packages. Here, we worry if the general budget will have sufficient funds left so we can buy paper for the last month out of each fiscal year. Let me point out that we don't run the computing services on campus. We only run the research machines and some of the teaching machines. The main campus computing facility is two Cyber 855's running NOS. Will the ksh run under NOS? If so, maybe we can talk somebody in the computing services department to budget for it. We're not a shoestring operation here. We have about 30 faculty members, 200 graduate students (including about 50 PhD students), and about 600 undergraduates. We provide all of those students with a fine, in-depth education even though the resources aren't available to make it as complete as some would wish. We don't teach Unix or C, although some grad students and selected undergrads may be exposed to it during some of their work. We just happen to have not enough funding for the number of students and the kind of quality we try to provide. It doesn't look like that will change anytime soon, for us, or for other schools in similar situations. Unless of course we can convince the current administration that we're a vital part of the defense program in this country and we can get budgeted a few hundred thousand dollars for screwdrivers and coffee makers. Further discussion on this topic should probably be in net.cse; I have provided a "Followup-to" line to reflect that. -- Gene "5 months and counting" Spafford The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332 CSNet: Spaf @ GATech ARPA: Spaf%GATech.CSNet @ CSNet-Relay.ARPA uucp: ...!{akgua,allegra,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,seismo,ulysses}!gatech!spaf