Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!gore!jacob
From: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: C++ pricing for AT&T Release 2.0, and 386 binaries
Message-ID: <110001@gore.com>
Date: 12 Jul 89 17:51:19 GMT
References: <1379@hcr.UUCP>
Reply-To: jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore)
Organization: Gore Enterprises
Lines: 56

/ comp.lang.c++ / mike@hcr.UUCP (Mike Tilson) / Jul 11, 1989 /
> If [cost of software] goes exactly to zero, then the expected commercial
> R&D investment in creation of new software products will go to zero
> as well. ...
> As a software vendor, we are investing in product development in the
> hope of receiving a return on that investment.  We think our investment
> will produce useful software; the market will tell us if we are right.
> We'll only get a return on our investment if we can charge a fee
> based on the use (e.g. number of copies, number of users, etc.) of
> our software.

Might it be that your R&D costs are much higher than they have to be
because you do not use existing Free (as in "unchained" -- I wish the word
wasn't overloaded in English) software?  You are not the only company who
has reinvented a window-based debugger for C++, you know.  I, as a user,
would certainly benefit from your improvements more if you could save
yourself (and me) money on "developing" the parts of the debugger that have
long been hashed out.

I think most people take the current economic "common sense" for granted,
without examining what would happen to the R&D costs (which, I agree, do
need to be recovered, one way or another) if the R&Ders could take
advantage of work already completed by others.

Sure, you can't make as much money selling a gcc-based compiler as you can
selling your own (or sublicensed for a fee and then modified).  But it
doesn't cost you as much to develop it, either.  And you benefit from
continuous improvements and fixes made to the compiler by other people.  In
this new bright competitive world of multiple C++ vendors that you
described, do you think they will all be helping each other with fixes to
cfront?  I think you will see less and less of that happening.

I think the most glaring example of that is Unix itself.  When a company
picks up a new Unix port, or set it up on a new machine of theirs, the
first thing they do is spend human-decades on fixing dormant bugs,
nonportable code, and various limitations that they don't consider proper
for a commercial OS.  Most of those fixes are (or can be) of general
nature, and would improve Unix code for other machines as well.  But do all
(or any) of these fixes find their way back to AT&T or Berkeley?  Not on
your life.  "We invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to make these
fixes... uhm, I mean, Value Additions, so let our competitors do their own
work!"

So now we have all these vendors out there providing Unix, and each one
ended up doing the same work that the others did.  What does that do to
prices that the users see?  That kind of competition is supposed to benefit
users?

> I think users benefit
> from an active, competitive, and profitable software industry.

So do I.  But instead, we get a software industry where each wheel is
reinvented hundreds of times.  What a waste of time and money.

--
Jacob Gore	Jacob@Gore.Com		{nucsrl,boulder}!gore!jacob