Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!thor!pcg From: pcg@thor.cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: 1-2 vs unlimited licenses (Unix for a 386) Message-ID: Date: 23 Aug 89 15:49:12 GMT References: <1989Aug16.020438.5662@esegue.uucp> <7186@megatest.UUCP> <1792@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <16031@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 80 In-reply-to: rcd@ico.ISC.COM's message of 22 Aug 89 04:30:26 GMT In article <16031@vail.ICO.ISC.COM> rcd@ico.ISC.COM (Dick Dunn) writes: Bill Davidsen objects: > I doubt that AT&T "made you do it." You say they get a higher royalty > for the unlimited version, why would they force you to offer a less > expensive version? My dim remembrance is that the AT&T royalty is (depending on volume) under $50 for 1-2 users and under $150 for unlimited (complete system, I think). Their explicit reason for the not high level of royalties was to encourage the diffusion of UNIX by making it possible to resell its binaries for cheap, e.g. like BellTech, Microport and Everex do; AT&T wants people to buy UNIX/386 for *much* cheaper than OS/2, both runtime and development system. The reason for 1-2 and unlimited was that 1-2 was for PC users (e.g. the ill fated 7300, or on a 386 UNIX as a competitor to OS/2) and workstations, and unlimited was for minis and other multiuser systems. AT&T decided to 'segment' their market this way. OK, let's turn it around so you will have a harder time avoiding under- standing it: They force us to charge more for a system which allows more than 2 users. We have to offer licenses in two classes because: - We have to offer the 1-2 user license due to economic pressure. Someone who's shopping among 386 UNIX vendors, particularly for a single-user system, will look at price. If we can pay AT&T less, we can maintain margin and sell the system cheaper. Note that the entire AT&T royalty is under 10% of the 386/ix selling price, i.e. just a fraction of the likely margin that ISC has on it. If the royalty were more like 30%, as for the low cost Microport, Everex, Belltech products, then the difference between the two royalties would excusably be too large to ignore. Darryl's point is that ISC is simply passing along AT&T's price-tiering--to do otherwise we'd either have to cut into the margin on the multiuser systems or inflate our profit on the 1-2's. Of course it is passing along the X Consortium's price-tiering that forces poor ISC to sell the X development system for $795 (more than the price of the Unix development system); or maybe it is true as somebody once wrote that ISC has huge QA costs (in validating free sw that is running successfully off the shelf at a few hundred or thousand sites around the world, and that is regularly updated by the X Consortium). Now an interesting aside: is it possible to just compile the X development system off the X Consortium distributed sources and use it with the ISC X server? If not, why? Has by any chance ISC hacked the protocol recognized by the X server so that it is now compatible only with their libraries, incidentally destroying interoperability? Otherwise, is there any *compelling* technical reason to buy the X library binaries from ISC for $795 instead of getting the sources with which everybody is already quite pleased from any friend for free? Another interesting pricing policy was DEC's with VAX Ultrix; each extra block of eight authorized users was priced to the tune of several *thousand* dollars, i.e. several hundred dollars per user, up to a maximum of 64 users. Is this still true for DEC? Is ISC going to adopt a similar pricing policy? :-> :->. The conclusion is that if companies want to charge what the market will bear, and/or charge high prices so as to dampen sales because their organization is already strained under the volume of those it makes now, they can, but please without blaming AT&T relatively very low royalties or QA that is terribly expensive, or... -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk