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From: dave@fps.com (Dave Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: What is that MOTIF thang on expo?!?
Message-ID: <579@celit.com>
Date: 23 Aug 89 20:46:25 GMT
References: <8908171153.AA02417@fnord.umiacs.UMD.EDU> <YYwIIyz0-csGBRyMYD@work8>
Sender: daemon@fps.com
Reply-To: dave@fps.com (Dave Smith)
Organization: FPS Computing Inc., San Diego CA
Lines: 46

In article <YYwIIyz0-csGBRyMYD@work8> tom@ICASE.EDU (Tom Crockett) writes:
>But seriously, I think that if workstation software prices were cut from about
>$1000 (that seems to be a popular figure these days) to about $100 or less, the
>number of copies sold would more than make up the difference in price.
>
>Given the quantity and improving quality of free software, it's very hard to
>justify spending $1000 on a package if there's any other way at all of getting
>the job done.

$1000 for source to a large package sounds pretty fair to me.  This source
license is aimed at vendors, not at individual users.  One consequence of the
(relatively) low source license cost is that vendors will be encouraged to
make _working_ binaries available at low cost.  Most likely vendors will
just bundle the product with the OS.

When I figure in the amount of time it takes me to get "free" software up
and running on a machine, the "free" software costs on the order of one
to two hundred dollars.  In addition, documentation needs to be printed
out, reproduced, etc.  This all assumes that the author wrote good code (which
has been my experience most times, but...) and didn't code in weird
assumptions about the hardware or OS.  If there's bugs in the code, the
cost goes up a lot.

Our initial cost on X was $500 for the tape from MIT.  X is "free" software;
we pay no redistribution fees.  However, in order for us to take X from
its initial state to a product we can support and distribute has cost us
quite a few thousand dollars of time spent testing the software, fixing
the little problems it has with our machine and bringing the documentation
into our format.

"Free" software is wonderful stuff and I'm most amazed at the quality of the
stuff.  Nonetheless, it does have costs associated with it, in the amount of 
time needed to bring it to a working state.  For the college student or home 
user the time is "free."  For a company, someone has to be paid to get it 
running.  If I have a need for something at work and two products exist to 
fulfill it, one costing $1000 with phone support, etc. and the other one 
"free", I will recommend we spend the $1000 since we'll end up doing it
anyway.  The cost is even greater with the "free" software than the time
that I will spend getting it to work, since there are opportunity costs 
involved; the amount of time I spend getting the software to work is time 
that I could have spent getting our product ready so that we can make money.

David L. Smith
FPS Computing, San Diego
ucsd!celerity!dave or dave@fps.com
"Repent, Harlequin!," said the TickTock Man