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From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,comp.os.mach
Subject: Re: Yale Pricing
Message-ID: <8019@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 22 Oct 90 20:58:10 GMT
References: <1990Oct7.034133.4903@zoo.toronto.edu> <8883@helios.TAMU.EDU> <1990Oct8.032554.23303@ni.umd.edu>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam
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In article <1990Oct8.032554.23303@ni.umd.edu> louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos) writes:
>
>All this flaming about how CMU doesn't make it easy to run Mach on 
><my favorite platform> for free is starting to annoy me.  Why do people
>have an expectation that research organization have the resources to
>do this sort of thing?  

I certainly agree with the premise that neither CMU nor any other
university has any obligation to do all the dirty work of making a
distribution.  And believe me, I can testify from actual experience
that it is a lot of work.  Nevertheless, I believe CMU has indeed
had a LOT of (tax) money from the government (e.g., DARPA), for BOTH
research and development, thus enabling Carnegie-Mellon
to give it away for free, provided that somebody else does
the packaging.  Since I'm in Europe, the situation is slightly different,
but I can certainly imagine an American company that wants to compete
in the UNIX-successor marketplace being pretty annoyed that Uncle Sam
is funding their competitor to give them a big price advantage.  If the
funding agency were MITI instead of DARPA, and the recipient were
the University of Tokyo instead of CMU, Uncle Sam would be screaming
Unfair!

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)