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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Inline assembler; a quiz  (long; sorry)
Message-ID: <8296@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Jul-87 15:06:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8296
Posted: Mon Jul 13 15:06:13 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jul-87 15:06:13 EDT
References: <608@zen.UUCP> <2299@hoptoad.uucp> <21211@sun.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 31

> > In fact, if they are clients of a certain solar workstation manufacturer,
> > they don't even have documentation (/usr/doc, that is).
> 
> Big deal.  You get documentation, you just don't get the "troff"
> source to it.  How many vendors *do* supply that stuff?

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...

(For those who haven't figured it out, I'm talking about AT&T and the original
Unix distributions.)

Shipping the printed copies only is just dandy if the user wants to run your
software absolutely straight out of the box.  Oddly enough, many don't, and
as a result they end up writing their own documentation from scratch.  Not
that Sun's documentation is any great shakes, in fact it stinks, but it
might be a useful starting point for some people.

> (Besides,
> getting it wouldn't do you any good; we use our own macro packages
> and other tools, and it would be too much trouble to supply and
> support them.)

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?
-- 
Mars must wait -- we have un-         Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
finished business on the Moon.     {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry