Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!asuvax!ncar!tank!mimsy!mojo!SYSMGR@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU
From: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: Re: License Management Facility (LMF)
Message-ID: <009350A3.973CC520@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Date: 11 Apr 90 15:01:52 GMT
References: <10142@shlump.nac.dec.com> <00934FDA.44D76CA0@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>,<5085@crltrx.crl.dec.com>
Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System)
Reply-To: sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney)
Organization: The U. of MD, CP, CAD lab
Lines: 54

In article <5085@crltrx.crl.dec.com>, jg@max.crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys) writes:
>Oh, so you want N CD roms every couple months, where N is large?
>And then you'll complain about simple products costing lots of
>money since the distribution costs will dominate what we ought
>to charge for it...

Producing a single CD-ROM probably runs between $5-7 dollars, once
you amoritize all the capital costs of equipment. I don't
work for Tower or Astiria records, so I can't tell you the exact price.

Of course, equating the distribution system of major record companies to
a major software distributor is probably quite silly. They're geared for
economies of scale. 

Of course, I came across a blurb in Infoworld where you can get 500 CD-ROMs
done for some low price ( Under $5K).

>Basically, if Unix is to succeed (or VMS for that matter) we need
>a much cheaper distribution mechanism than we have right now.
>And floppies and tape don't cut it...  They are manual, expensive, slow,
>small and less reliable than CD's.

I think the success or failure of OSes is not dependent upon the distribution
mechanism. VMS and UNIX seem to have survived this long without CD ROM. 

Tape is 2-3 times as expensive, mediawise, than CD-ROM. At $15 vs $5-7
dollars, I don't think you'll break anyone there, even if you have 2-3 tapes.

>The model you suggest basically doesn't work; you should see the number
>of tapes we get internally, subscribing to all DEC products
>as we do here.  

>Granted CD's are smaller and cheaper, just the
>time to put them in and out of the CDROM reader becomes a major
>hassle. 

Make a fortune. Take a 5 or 6 disk commecial CD player mechanism and
convert it to data reading. Sell zillions to those people who want to have
access to 5-6 CDs, but not all at once. 

>The docs will also be on line (look at Bookreader on VMS).

What happens when the machine crashes and you can't get Bookreader?

>If it is a hassle, then we've failed.  But don't damn it before
>you touch it.

Having done LMF on VMS, it is a hassle. Since I have a VAX cluster with
20 machines, how many little LMF paks do I have to type in? Twenty. 
Of course, since the VAXstation IIs were set up differently than the
VAXstation 3100s, I had to backwards-engineer what happened in the first
place, licensewise....

				Doug