Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!DIAMOND.BBN.COM!dm From: dm@DIAMOND.BBN.COM ("Dave Mankins") Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: Traffic on the X list Message-ID: <8807061628.AA22039@quartz.BBN.COM> Date: 7 Jul 88 23:51:57 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 65 > [talk about how the $100 fee for News binaries is a tiny impediment.] A couple of years ago (post News, although at the time it was still called Sundew) I worked for a company that builds a large-scale parallel processor which does not run SUN binaries, and at the time didn't even run UNIX. For the price of a few hours spent running FTP, and a couple of days spent debugging my Berkeley socket emulation library, we had X up and running on this machine. We were able to show our management that X on this machine was a reasonably good thing, and they agreed, and a little while later it was a part of our product line (it helps that we liked to distribute sources with our products). (It was this easy because our machine is a computer, not a workstation, so I didn't have to port the display portion, which is more hardware-dependent.) What would it take to talk my boss-beings into springing for the $40K source license, signing a semi-restrictive agreement with what was, more or less, a competitor, just to do an EVALUATION? Especially when that $40K could immediately be applied to buying workstations to make our programmers more productive? I'm not flaming SUN, I think that if you do good work, you're entitled to ask money for it, if you so choose. However, I think that in order for something to become a standard, you have to be pretty loose with the sources, so people can port it to their machine without spending more time talking to the company's lawyers than they spend doing the port. I hate talking to lawyers. Even believing that Sundew was a superior paradigm, X was preferable, because we could spend the News source license fee putting Sun 3/50s on 10 of the department's desks immediately instead of a year later. It would be a LONG time before the value-added of News over X came any where close to the value-added of those 10 workstation-years. News ain't ever likely to run on that machine, because: o they've got a ``pretty good'' window system now, one that interoperates with all our other workstation and CPU vendors --- we can even put PCs on the net running X o since they've got X, they no longer pay much attention to yet another window system from SUN, so they don't know what they're missing o the above two reasons have to be overcome to justify the expense of a source license (which they need to port the software to their multiprocessors and their vaxen) I'm sure that they're not the only hardware vendor in a similar fix. The News BINARY license is comparable to the expense of getting the X SOURCE tape, if you're on the internet, X is FREE. The value-added of News over X isn't immediately obvious, so why spend all that money on a gamble (at the time Sundew first came out, it was Suns THIRD incompatible window system. Who could predict that there wouldn't be a fourth)? The first they're likely to see of News will be after the X/News combined server comes out, so they can run their existing software on it. X is like a weed, it can germinate and spread to your machine without much attention on your part. With News you have to spend $40,000 in garden tools and fertilizer before you even get the seeds.