Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!Horne-Scott From: Horne-Scott@cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Borland and other proprietary bloodsuckers (Was: Re: BISON, GCC, and the GNU public license.) Message-ID: <68726@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> Date: 4 Aug 89 20:39:07 GMT References: <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <26880@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5486@ficc.uu.net> Sender: root@yale.UUCP Reply-To: Horne-Scott@cs.yale.edu (Scott Horne) Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven, CT 06520-2158 Lines: 45 In-reply-to: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) In article <5486@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc (Peter da Silva) writes: > In article <26880@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes: > > [back to commercial licenses] > > Correct. However, I don't see any commercial license agreement that > > doesn't require that either I buy time on the target hardware, or that > > the owner of the target hardware buy the commercial product, if I want > > them to have a trivial installation process. > > Check out any of Borland's products, Microsoft C, Lattice C, Lattice C++, > Aztec C, or any of the other microcomputer compiler vendors. I have. I purchased Turbo Prolog around December of 1987. I received the earliest release, which is full of bugs. Hoping for fixes in the next version, I sent in several detailed bug reports. No thank-you letter was ever sent; indeed, Borland didn't even acknowledge receipt of my bug reports. When a decent version came out a few months later, I called Borland to ask about the upgrade fee: it was $75. That plus the price I'd paid only a few months earlier ($60-$70) totalled about $20 more than the price of the new version! About a year ago, I wrote a letter to their Customer "Service" Dept to complain about the ridiculous charge for an upgrade from a version that fell far short of its advertised capabilities. The response? ``Our new version has so many improvements and bug fixes that we feel that our fee for an upgrade is justified'' (paraphrasing)! My complaint that my bug reports were never acknowledged drew thanks long overdue. Another netter suggests that "anyone who contributes a bug report that is used by a software vendor to make a fix, and hence enhance the value of the product, is due royalties on all future sales of the product containing the fix." If vendors are going to be so parsimonious about upgrades, I'll have to agree. It'll be a cold day in hell when I pay Bugs-R-Us, Inc, $60-$70 to be their thankless alpha-tester again. --Scott Scott Horne Undergraduate programmer, Yale CS Dept Facility horne@cs.Yale.edu ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne Home: 203 789-0877 SnailMail: Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520 Work: 203 432-1260 Summer residence: 175 Dwight St, New Haven, CT Dare I speak for the amorphous gallimaufry of intellectual thought called Yale?