Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!midway!ncar!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Un*X cost Message-ID: <2830@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Date: 2 Nov 90 14:00:38 GMT References: <2176@lupine.NCD.COM> <42310@mips.mips.COM> <43029@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <2804@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1481@frapper.nsc.com> <3686@skye.ed.ac.uk> <0093F120.38 Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY Lines: 22 In article <0093F120.388EDA40@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes: | I know it will make the hackers happy, but for those poor folks (such as | myself) who prefer not to go recompile the OS, it isn't going to make much | difference....they'll still end up purchasing products with a "supported" | UNIX bundled in. Amen. I have written one (small) o/s from scratch myself, and two small compilers, and been on teams to write another o/s and compiler. I have maintained a commercial o/s at our site in spite of the best efforts of the vendor to degrade performance and reliability at every turn. I think I have a reasonably good idea of the effort involved in keeping these things going, and I would *never* roll my own if there were a viable commercial alternative. I'm sure a lot of people will be selling the GNU o/s as a supported product, and the customer won't care a bit about the availability of source code in most cases. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) The Twin Peaks Halloween costume: stark naked in a body bag