Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!gatech!bloom-beacon!think!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy
From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Inline assembler; a quiz  (long; sorry)
Message-ID: <23369@sun.uucp>
Date: Tue, 14-Jul-87 06:10:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.23369
Posted: Tue Jul 14 06:10:55 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Jul-87 05:20:51 EDT
References: <608@zen.UUCP> <2299@hoptoad.uucp> <21211@sun.uucp> <8296@utzoo.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Lines: 83

> Well, I recall one that did.  No support, no bug fixes, no help, no advice,
> don't-call-us-we'll-call-you... but they did ship sources.  Funny, their
> system became awfully popular for some reason...

Funny thing is, it became a lot more popular, at least by the count
of the number of systems sold outside AT&T, after the V7 license came
out; most of those systems didn't come with source, because there was
an order-of-magnitude difference between the price of the source
license and the binary license.

Furthermore, there are a lot of customers out there who probably
wouldn't make use of the source if they had it.  I don't think it's
current popularity is due to the availability of sources to all
customers, since most of them don't have it; it may be due, in part,
to the availability of source to the select few who *could* make use
of it, but that's a different matter.

I would be very surprised if, for example, most organizations doing
desktop publishing would prefer to get the source to the OS and the
desktop publishing software running on their workstation and getting
"no support, no bug fixes, no help, no advice" from their vendors, to
getting what level of support their vendor offers but no source.
There are certainly customers who, because they have a sufficiently
expert staff (and are, perhaps, having trouble with vendor support),
*would* be better off under those circumstances.  There are certainly
others who would still not be better off.

It's a question of tradeoffs.  I have seen no evidence that the
tradeoff made by the original UNIX community is appropriate for all
potential customers of systems with UNIX as their OS.  The fact that
it happened to be the correct tradeoff for a technically
sophisticated group of users with specialized needs that vendors
often have difficulty responding to in no way indicates that it would
be the correct tradeoff for an organization with few or no
programmers in it.

> Funny, I seem to recall IBM using an explanation along those lines when asked
> why they didn't supply sources in a high-level language.  "Well, we've got
> all this great stuff, but we can't be bothered letting the peons, oops I
> mean the customers, have it."  Is this really the model Sun wants to emulate?

How the hell should I know?  I don't make Sun policy on this matter;
I don't make Sun policy on *most* matters.  I resent the fact that
Brian somehow seemed to consider a complaint about Sun's policy on
this to somehow be an appropriate response to my comment.

The point *I* was making was that UNIX source is not something that
every UNIX user has available; at this point, it may be that *most*
UNIX users don't have it.  Some consider this a Bad Thing; I don't,
because I'm not particularly interested in having only those people
who could make use of this source and are willing to fork out the
dough to AT&T and other vendors for it.  And no, that's not just for
purely pecuniary reasons; I think UNIX has a lot to offer people who
don't fit into that category, and I like the idea of getting it out
to those customers.  I would be overjoyed if the number of UNIX sites
where the C compiler is *never* used was an appreciable fraction of
the number of sites where it is used.

The claim that you don't have documentation if you don't have it in a
machine-readable form is, when taken as a general claim, absurd.
There are users who could use, or who need, the machine-readable
documentation.  There are others who have little use for it; they
don't have the time to spend learning how to produce that
documentation, modifying it, or printing it.

The original UNIX releases were done in a fashion that worked out
very well for its original constituency.  I am well aware of that,
having worked with it since 1977 or so.  However, the original
constituency no longer represents all of the UNIX community; it may
not even represent a majority of the community.  The response by
vendors to this change has caused some problems for the original
constituency.  This is unfortunate, and it may be that some of the
problems are due to inappropriate responses to these changes, but I
don't think that all of it is.

As for documentation tools:  there *would* be some effort involved in
supplying those tools.  I have no idea whether the cost of supplying
those tools exceeds the benefits of doing so.  I assume that the
people directly involved in this have reason to believe that the
costs currently outweigh the benefits.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com