Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!bzs
From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: Traffic on the X list
Message-ID: <23581@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 1 Jul 88 23:21:38 GMT
References: <8807010130.AA17684@quartz.BBN.COM> <11199@jade.BBN.COM>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 66
In-reply-to: mlandau@bbn.com's message of 1 Jul 88 18:16:15 GMT


>In comp.windows.news, dm@DIAMOND.BBN.COM ("Dave Mankins") writes:
>>>Maybe it's because of the bugs. (grin)
>>More likely it's because of the price.
>
>Even more likely, it's because of the politics that prevent other
>vendors from supplying NeWS ports for their machines.
>
>The $100 fee for NeWS binaries doesn't seem like a big impediment 
>to anyone who wants to run it on a Sun.  Of course, you don't get
>sources, but then again you don't tend to NEED sources to get 
>NeWS working, unlike certain other window systems we could name :-)
>--
> Matt Landau		    	   Riding shotgun down the avalanche

To some extent it's a bootstrap problem (at least as viewed from here,
where we don't have any NeWS yet.)

Ok, it's $100/copy (RTU is cheaper but manuals are nice which seems to
be a lot of what that $100 is for.) We have 100 or so workstations,
that's $10K, well, we don't need it for nearly that many at this
point, how many do we need it for?

Hmm, well, I guess developers around here, people who want to have an
opinion as it comes onto the scene, like myself, to advise the others
here. Well, lessee, a dozen copies might do it, $1200, that's probably
how many people might be using X around here right now from time to
time, maybe a few less would do it. Not a whole lot of money really,
but hardly free.

But it *is* beta software, and I think it's supposed to show up
magically bundled anyhow "real soon now" (remember that the "real soon
now" was originally something like last April and has been slipping,
seemed like we might as well wait, the beta stuff sounded pretty
buggy, and people running 1.0 said wait for 1.1, and I don't remember
any real announcement of that, I did see some mention on the net so I
sort of knew it must be ready, but "real soon now...")

And besides, we FTP'd over X and got it running and that was all
rather painless, how many window systems do I want to play with at
once? Ach, play with X now, wait for NeWS, it's coming it's coming.

And it's not like there are applications out there crying for NeWS
(eg. things like Frame), there's no noise I've heard from our users
(as a matter of fact I have no idea off-hand what is available with
NeWS other than the environment and a terminal emulator, am I missing
something? How would I know? I haven't seen any literature really and
I haven't noticed lots of sources being posted here to things I just
*must* have, or reference to the same, that's part of the bootstrap
problem I guess, if everyone's waiting for some critical threshold of
applications to appear then they're [we're] not writing them.)

My 2c: if they had thrown the beta Sun stuff (binary is probably fine)
somewhere to anonymous FTP with some on-line supporting docs (or even
just sent the salesthings around with some hardcopies of core docs to
hand out to people they thought should be playing with it at this
stage, or even charged a few bucks) more people would probably be
playing with it.

Right now it sort of sits in the well of this energy threshold,
wondering if tomorrow's mailbox will just sort of have a tape of it
sitting there, and I'm trying to figure out the Widgets library and
putting up CLX and trying to get it to do something, maybe with PCL,
and porting the X software to things like Encores and...

	-Barry Shein, Boston University