Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!bu-cs!bzs From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux Subject: Re: Future direction of A/UX? Message-ID: <31537@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 21 May 89 17:37:57 GMT References: <4036@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> <7304@hoptoad.uucp> <30843@apple.apple.com> <419@w3vh.uu.net> Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci. Lines: 38 In-reply-to: michael@xanadu.COM's message of 21 May 89 06:00:35 GMT >I have seen this suggestion before, with a reply from an Apple person >giving downside reasons. As I recall, the main points were liability >exposure for false advertising if the third-party software didn't >perform, and exposure to accusations of playing favorites from those >not included on the list. Argh, that's like saying they don't want to try to sell A/UX because they'd have to pay income taxes on all the money they'd make. Every major computer company I know of provides lists of products they believe work with their systems. They can either spend some money to verify that the products really work or disclaim that they do any such checking (which of course lessens the value of the recommendation, but doesn't open them to legal consequences unless there was WILLFUL attempt to defraud, such as claiming they have tested its suitability when in fact they haven't.) Simply collating and repeating the claims of the sources does not transfer liability. Sun, DEC, IBM etc salespeople love to hand you their third-party product catalogs the first time they meet you. It seems to me even Apple does this with MacOS. And *every* company plays favorites (or, more precisely, excludes non-favorites, show me some Emulex recommendations from DEC, Parity or Trimarchi recommendations from Sun or Amdahl recommendations from IBM!) That's not sue-able as long as they make no claims that they will include everyone and anyone, and they never do ("mumble reserves the right to refuse...") Maybe Apple's position on this is being misrepresented here. -- -Barry Shein, Software Tool & Die There's nothing more terrifying to hardware vendors than satisfied customers.