🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1906@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>Meanwhile the news software changes out from under them, they are
>shipping buggy code whose bug fixes have long ago been fixed and
>forgotten, and they get calls from customers claiming that it came with
>their machine so the vendor should support it (i.e. document it well,
>supply patches and new releases, etc).  All in all, a hassle ... Easier to
>let the customers get it from a neighboring system or a mod.sources archive.

Pyramid has been shipping Netnews and a variety of other user contributed
packages with its OSx release for some time now. Most of Pyramid's customers
are commercial sites, hence they prefer having things like Netnews provided
for them and integrated with the rest of the release.

The problem has not been bugs and updates; much PD software is higher quality
than what we get from AT&T. And commercial sites tend to be less concerned
about the latest wizbang versions, so long as what they have is decently
supported. But documentation has been a disaster. Most PD documentation is
terrible, and when it's getting close to the release date and Tech Pubs has
to chose between doing the Netnews manual and the Virtual Disk manual, you
can guess which gets priority. But documentation is the first thing the
customer sees when they want to try out a new package, so the perception of
our PD products has not been good.

We will probably continue to supply and support PD software with the release,
since we have customers who ask for it. It sure is a goodness-of-our-hearts
issue, though; we do not and cannot charge anything for the software, and no
one is going to buy a Pyramid just because we have Netnews supported on it.
(It may even be a strike against us. :-))

I wouldn't expect anyone else to try it.

<csg>