From: ayr@node_man.uucp (Aleksey Y. Romanov) Subject: Ho much USL license(was Re: Is this becoming comp.linux.advocacy) Date: Sat, 7 Aug 1993 16:07:21 GMT
In article <CBCGxz.4I8@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:
>
>Commercial vendors looking at the market will develop for those
>environments in which they can make a buck. It's reasonable for them to
>assume that people who want their Unix for free aren't likely to spend
>even $100 on an X server for accelerated cards -- so even if Linux is on
>their porting list, it's on the bottom.
>
>No matter how big the Linux installed base gets, its users will be
>perceived as those who aren't interested in paying for software, and
>resist software supplied without source. So commercial vendors will
>have little interest in these users, no matter what their numbers.
>
>For someone whose interest in Unix doesn't include commercial software,
>Linux is a fantasic environment. Use sc as a spreadsheet, TeX or BSD
>troff along with your favourite editor for word processing, University
>Ingres or perl as your database, and you can have a fairly good system
>upon which a lot of useful work can be done. And you'll still have
>source for everything....
>
>But don't go spreading the manure that suggests Linux will ever be taken
>seriously by any significant number of commercial application or driver
>vendors. There's absolutely no basis for anyone to believe this except
>evangelical fervor.
Please do not flame too hard if I am wrong :).
I agree with Evan. But .... Linux has a big advantage over UNIX in the
area of development resources. There are thousands of Linux and GNU
enthusiasts and there are tens of engineers developing commercial
UNIX. And among these engineers there are not many whose business is
bug fixing. So, as a result We have an advanced standard UNIX environment
which is too buggy from my point of view. Can the advantages of
Linux and commercial UNIX be unified in a single product ?
How much is USL(or Univel) source license ? I heard that it is below
$200,000. I guess that it is possible to find 200 unix-fans (each will
contribute $1000) in order to found a UNIX company.
The charter of this company has to include:
1. To fix bugs in kernel and utilities and to sell fixed drop-in
UNIX component replacements on the commercial market,
The emphasis shall be made on kernel bug fixing and
drop-in replacements from PD (of free) software.
The latter one will insure the wider use of free software
componenets in order to increase development resource base:
the guy whose job is to port network utilities from say NET2
release does not have to have access to the licensed source
code from USL.
2. The Sane UNIX Project. The goal of this project is to make
an offering of low cost (say below $200 per node)
PC networking environment. By combining
in the single product the best of: the debugged core of commercial
UNIX system, free software, commercial software from different
vendors (example Motif from OSF, not Moolit). No decision
has to be made due to NIH decease.
I do expect this to have a form of spare time activity for contributors
at least for a first time.
May be Solaris is a better candidate for such a project I do not know.
Once again, please, do not flame me too much if am totally wrong.
> Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
> evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
> "It costs a lot of money to look as cheap as I do" -- Dolly Parton
Aleksey
-- Aleksey Y. RomanovDISCLAIMER: The views expressed are entirely my own and do not necessary reflect those of my employer or anyone else