Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!ico!rcd
From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: Who sells 4.0?  Does Intel??
Summary: miscellaneous musings on price, etc.
Message-ID: <1990Oct19.222636.9227@ico.isc.com>
Date: 19 Oct 90 22:26:36 GMT
References: <jacobson.656092004@atanasoff> <34996@cup.portal.com> <267@srchtec.UUCP>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO
Lines: 50

mra@srchtec.UUCP (Michael Almond) writes about a chat with UHC.  (BTW, has
anyone suggested to the UHC folks that they might join in here on USENET?)

> Just like all the other suppliers they don't offer online documentation...

All which other suppliers?  ISC and SCO both offer online documentation
(after, among other things, being beaten up about it by netfolk:-)...

> Also, they said the main part of the high price involves the fees from AT&T.

Could some other folks who've been reading this group for a while help me
out here.  I'm *sure* I remember that one of the great things about V.4 was
supposed to be that the royalties were going to be so much lower than V.3
that the end-user price would be dirt-cheap.  Did I just hallucinate that?

and immediately following on from that...
> Apparently AT&T is moving away from 3.2...

This just doesn't follow, somehow.  It sounds like "We want to move from
X to Y, so we'll encourage it by raising the price on Y."  Note - I *don't*
mean this as a criticism of what Michael wrote.  I assume he's just
reporting; I'm just trying to make sense of it.

>...So I guess most other vendors when
> they release 4.0 will have higher prices than they do now.

Again...didn't we hear a pitch for V.4 in the past (perhaps a year or a
little more ago) where "lower price" was a big point?  If not, I've got to
go out and get my brain recalibrated.

> Does anyone know why they charge from X Window's.  It is free software
> to anyone who wants it from MIT.  I could understand maybe $100 for media
> and manuals, but $795?

Several possibilities; lots of conjecture here:
	- What you get from MIT needs a lot of work to turn it into product
	  quality with good performance.  (I certainly spent enough time in
	  the assembly-language mud for the one X server I worked on!)
	- Their X package included X11/NeWS, OpenLook, XView toolkit.
	  Don't these all require some Sun licensing fees?  I don't think
	  they're too expensive (since Sun is trying to encourage use of
	  OpenLook and XView) but I thought there was some cost.
	- Is this a developer's X package?  Since the rest of the system
	  is developer-oriented, it seems likely.  This might include some
	  of UHC's development tools.  It would also mean they're expecting
	  small quantities at this point, which requires larger margins
	  than the eventual end-user product.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.