Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lll-winken!decwrl!decwrl!granite.pa.dec.com!mwm From: mwm@raven.pa.dec.com (Mike (Real Amigas have keyboard garages) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: An issue for the entire Amiga Community. Message-ID: Date: 25 May 90 21:09:16 GMT References: <1990May17.001308.29541@csmil.umich.edu> <136089@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <11747@cbmvax.commodore.com> <136118@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <1401@faatcrl.UUCP> <5366@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 26 In-reply-to: barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU's message of 25 May 90 14:36:01 GMT In article <5366@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett) writes: IMHO, Chuck McManis has a very good idea about what it takes, both academically and financially, to put out a commercial software product. Yup, he does. I suspect Chuck also has a good idea of how much providing support for a complex commercial product costs. That doesn't mean he's correct about shareware/freeware raping the commercial market. There are just to many commercial products that compete with shareware for that to be true. I suspect he picked a particularly bad example with emacs. There are commercial emac's for the IBM PC (or were last time I checked), even though most of the microemacs in the Amiga world started life on the IBM PC. Methinks the Amiga market is a particularly bad place to try and sell a commercial emacs - the non-hacker portion of the market is to small to support such a product, and you have to battle the excellent non-emacs like editors, both commercial and otherwise, for that market.