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From: rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Price of DWB 3.1
Message-ID: <1990Dec1.004822.6498@ico.isc.com>
Date: 1 Dec 90 00:48:22 GMT
References: <1990Nov5.022533.29625@nixtdc.uucp> <16706@letni.UUCP> <1990Nov28.193202.19684@cbnewsl.att.com>
Organization: Interactive Systems Corporation, Boulder, CO
Lines: 48

npn@cbnewsl.att.com (nils-peter.nelson) writes, in reply to Jay Plett and
bits from others...

> Plett upholds the history of troff. So do I. My criticism
> was of the externally packaged DWB 2.0 release compared
> with what was being used internally at the time...

Having tried to rebuild 2.0, I have to concur with npn's earlier
assessments of the problems there.

> Plett and Dunn call DWB a 'little' piece. There are 112 files
> in the version on this system, and that doesn't count the font
> tables and files. 35,000 blocks of source code hardly qualifies
> at little. There are 23 new postscript programs alone.

First, let me explain my characterization of size:  I think of "DWB" as
troff, tbl, eqn, pic, grap, a back-end, and some miscellaneous others. 
It's a lot of code, sure, and it's valuable code.  (I wouldn't complain
about the cost so much if I didn't want it!!)  But DWB is typically
something like 5% of a complete UNIX system in size.  That doesn't mean I
expect it to be 5% of the price--that would be unrealistic.  But I think
having it be 30-50% of the price of a complete UNIX system is unrealistic
in the other direction.

I'm hoping that "35,000 blocks" was really meant to be 35,000 lines!  I'm
unwilling to think of 17 Mb of source code for DWB--that would be about a
ten-folk expansion.

> Having lost that battle, what is a reasonable price for
> 60,000 or so lines of well-tested, portable source code?

Pricing is always tricky.  However, you do have to take into account the
market--it's not closed; there are a few other serious text-processing
systems out there.  The price needs to be set based on what it's worth to
people, not what it cost you to develop it.  (The relationship between
worth-to-customer and cost-to-developer is only the minor matter of whether
you make money on it.:-)

> My own personal vision is for DWB to be something you can
> count on wherever you compute...

The trouble with that is that the unbundling killed it.  I'm with you--AT&T
should have bundled it with UNIX.  But as long as it's an option, and an
expensive one (relative to the rest of the system) it's not likely that
enough people will have it that you can count on it.  That's too bad.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Mr. Natural says, "Use the right tool for the job."


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