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From: phil@eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.encore
Subject: Re: Questions regarding: Mach Release 1.0 for the Multimax
Message-ID: <3713@casbah.acns.nwu.edu>
Date: 19 Feb 91 16:42:48 GMT
References: <14033@encore.Encore.COM> <3507@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <14083@encore.Encore.COM> <3649@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> <14091@encore.Encore.COM>
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Reply-To: phil@eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre)
Organization: Northwestern University
Lines: 59

To help sort this out:

|>    is boykin

|> |> is me

In article <14091@encore.Encore.COM>, boykin@encore.com (Joseph Boykin) writes:


|> Why would you care what object file format we use?  Unless you have
|> another machine with the same instruction set (unlikely on an NS32K based
|> system!) with a different object file format, what's the difference?

Kyoto Common Lisp cares.  gcc cares.  gdb cares.  And there are other
commonly used items of free software that like to have the Berkeley(?)
a.out format.  These may eventually be modified to cope with COFF 
(some already have), but in the meantime my job is harder.

I wouldn't care quite so much, except that I have yet to find a decent
debugger for UMAX.  We have cdb and I don't see it as "decent".  There
is no dbx equivalent, and even if we had the source to dbx we couldn't
use it because, well, because it doesn't understand COFF.

|> phil@eecs.nwu.edu (William LeFebvre) writes:
|> |>  boykin@encore.com (Joseph Boykin) writes:
|> |> |> $1,000 for Mach.
|> |> |> $4,000 for NFS.
|> |> 
|> |> I find that pricing structure quite odd.
|> 
|> Why?
|> ...
|> Most of the reason for this has to do with SUN, not Encore.
|> SUN is requiring us to pay royalties for NFS under Mach.  That royalty
|> can be measured in thousands of dollars given a bunch of different factors.

A HA!  That explains it.  I had forgotten about the royalties.

I found it odd that a package could cost 4 times as much as something
that is substantially larger (and must be much more complicated) than
itself.

|> Regardless, this is a different product, just because someone buys NFS
|> for Umax there doesn't seem to be alot of reasoning behind giving NFS
|> for Mach for free.  

I didn't say there was.  I was just asking.

|> If we didn't have to pay
|> another royalty to SUN, than the price should be less for those with
|> NFS for Umax, but that isn't the case.

And that is, likely, the crux of the matter.

		William LeFebvre
		Computing Facilities Manager and Analyst
		Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
		Northwestern University
		<phil@eecs.nwu.edu>