Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!att!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT and sources
Message-ID: <8621@alice.UUCP>
Date: 28 Dec 88 15:34:29 GMT
References: <1981@scolex>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: AT&T, Bell Labs
Lines: 32

In article <1981@scolex> allanh@sco.COM (Allan J. Heim) writes:
]steve@fnord.umiacs.umd.edu (Steven D. Miller) wrote:
]
]>An educational-market machine that won't sell in the educational market
]>because no one can get sources doesn't have much of a market left, does it?
]
]Absolutely!  Just look at Apple (with the Apple II series and the Macintosh)
]and IBM (with their line of PCs)....
]
]Seriously, since when does the lack of sources spell doom for a computer?
]I've never heard of companies giving away source with their computers.
]Am I wrong?

Yes you are.

When my university was looking for a "big" (for those days) Unix (or Unix-like)
machine for our computer science dept, getting the source (basically free of
charge) was one of the top requirements. Just a tape with the standard System
V or BSD source was not good enough. It had to be *the* source for their
particular machine. For several companies this was no problem at all, and the
source for UTX/32 we got with our Gould machine has proven to be extremely
useful.

I can assure you that if 2 comparable computer products are available, one
with and one without source, the one without source won't go far in the
educational market.

Paul.
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