dinah@lgc.com (Dinah McNutt) (05/17/91)
Hi, I'm the person heading up the SUG-CD rom effort and thought I would try and make a few clarifications. First of all, this *is* a volunteer effort. The members of the Sun local user group here in Houston has spent many hours compiling and testing software. The costs of producing the SUG CD/ROM are probably more than you would first imagine. For example, we had to purchase over $10K in hardware just to get the disk and backup capabilities to support this work. In addition, administrative personnel (someone had to handle all those forms), legal costs, overhead (someone has to pay the rent, electricity, travel, phone calls, etc), and so on puts our costs at well over $20,000. And after all that is done we still don't have one CD, just a disk image that will become the CD. In fact, the cost of the actual CD's themselves, as was pointed out, is minimal. SUG operates on a very tight budget and we owe it to our members to try and re-coup the many expenses associated with this project. We are also not-for-profit which means any profits will be invested back into the group. A very good point was made in that we need to work on membership benefits. Any suggestions in this area are welcome and can be addressed to board@sug.org. Also, our executive director is Peter Salus (formerly executive director of Usenix) who can be reached at peter@sug.org. We spent effort in trying to understand the current copyright laws. Our attorney has advised us that the only way to guarantee that we are not infringing on any copyrights is to obtain written permission. This was not meant to inconvenience anyone, but to protect ourselves and to protect the authors from unauthorized distribution of their software. Many contributors have been delighted that we want to include their software and have even provided us with the latest and greatest versions hot off the disk. We have designed the layout so that you can mount the CD under /usr/sug and the compiled binaries will work. Many pieces of software require that you know ahead of time where the software will reside. (TeX is one example.) So if you choose to use the pre-compiled binaries, you may do so. We are also providing indexed versions of the sun-managers,sun-spots, and sun-nets archives. You can grep through the indexes and then look at the items of interest "on-line". In addition, the whole disk is laid out so things are in logical places: /usr/sug /bin /bin.sun3 /lib /lib.sun3 /etc /share /man /src and so on. This is an enormous effort and there will be room for improvement, but with constructive criticism next year's will be even better (and maybe even cheaper!) Also, I encourage everyone out there to get involved with your local Sun user group and SUG. We need help in many different areas. With the exception of the office staff, SUG is a volunteer organization. All the board members volunteer our time and we recognize that there are many different perspectives and ideas and welcome input. That's one reason the news group comp.org.sug was created - to be a forum for SUG-related discussions. Regards, Dinah McNutt Secretary, Sun Users Group -- Dinah McNutt internet: dinah@bcm.tmc.edu | dinah@sug.org | dinah@expert.com