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