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From: korp@atlantis.ees.anl.gov (Peter Korp)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x,alt.sys.sun,comp.windows.x.announce
Subject: Re: The real OpenWindows source announcement
Message-ID: <1990Nov18.174702.5175@mcs.anl.gov>
Date: 18 Nov 90 17:47:02 GMT
References: <1154@dg.dg.com> <17545@rasp.eng.cam.ac.uk> <1990Nov18.164227.24153@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
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>In article <17545@rasp.eng.cam.ac.uk>, jpmg@eng.cam.ac.uk (Patrick Gosling) writes:
>> In article <1154@dg.dg.com> uunet!dg!lewine writes:
>> >|> free of
>> >|> charge (cost of media only -- $995).  
>> >
>> >If this media costs SUN $995 I would like to talk to them about 
>> >selling them blank tapes.
>> 
>> Just to be fair to sun, I gather that what you get for your $995 includes a
>> fairly large stack of documentation.  Take the price that GNU (sorry, the
>> FSF) (for example) charge for media ($150 per tape isn't it?), and the kind
>> of price you pay for books nowadays, and it don't seem _too_ bad.
>> 

Since the announcement I have heard all the talk of the mysterious $995 *media*
charge. They do seem to use gold tape no?

Well it seems there is an answer to all this. In attempting to make OpenWindows
freely available Sun had to negotiate with AT&T. Apparently some AT&T code
exists in OW 2.0 or own some rights to it. Therefore, the best deal(?) Sun
could come up with was to charge a rather large one time fee for docs and media
yet allow you to copy source freely. The costs for redistributing binaries of
OpenWindows with systems is also basiclly to cover the royalties to AT&T for
each copy. An interesting side effect is that if you port OpenWindows to a 
non-UNIX platform then no royalties must be paid.

So it is not as great a deal as we all wish it would have been, but I think
Sun has got the right intentions. Let us hope that OpenWindows version 3 will
be kept clear of all of these licensing issues.

As a side note, since the announcement by Sun I have found at least 3 vendors
whose engineering groups are claiming to be ready to ship X11/NeWS servers with
their hardware/UNIX.

1) Everex - PC maker and ESIX makers will ship X11/NeWS with release 4 of ESIX
            this will be sometime Q1-91.

2) Commodore - Makers of the Amiga and also V.4 on Amigas, says that once the
               current implementation of X11R4 is up, they will concentrate on
               porting X11/NeWS to their system. Timeframe, probably Q2-91

3) UHX - Makers of some techinally cool hardware, i860/486 machines claims to
         be shipping X11/NeWS as part of their V.4 package.

This seems to be a good start for OpenWindows.


Peter