🚀 go-pugleaf

songer@lexmark.com (Christopher Songer) writes:

>The thing to watch out for is the IBM disease Sun has recently acquired.
>Your workststion is $4200, but ... Oh you want a compiler for that? That's
>extra. Seriously, we are holding back going to a new rev of Sun OS because
>they want to charge us for lots of things that used to be free. The harware
>is cheap, but the total cost is probably more.
And this is from a kinda-sorta IBM guy? (Assuming Lexmark is still
owned by IBM) ;-) 

Yes, Sun C isn't free anymore.  NeXT is.  BUT: NeXT uses a hacked gcc,
and probably didn't have to do anywhere near as much compiler
development work as Sun did.  You can get gcc for Sparc/Solaris-2 for
free, so the C compiler isn't really an issue.

The other NeXT software, however, is immensely valuable to a
developer.  (Don't read this, NeXT:) If I was making a living
developing NeXT software (I'm not) I would pay a large amount of 
money for IB if it wasn't bundled with the OS.

I can actually understand Sun's reasoning.  Software support is *very*
expensive so it makes sense for Sun (and possibly everyone else) that
only those who *need* the tech support for, say, Sun C, pay for it.
If you buy 100 SPARCs to run some generic application such as
FrameMaker, would you really be interested in paying ~100 per box for
software and support you don't use?  (The $100 figure is a guess; I
figured that if 1 SPARC in 20 is used for development, the per-machine
cost for C would be 1/20 of the $2000 SunC license fee).

We're seeing a situation now where high-end PCs and low-end PCs are
having similar performance and are used for running shrinkwrapped
software, so it's hardly surprising that PCs and workstations are
becoming similar in terms of what the vendor bundles with the OS.

Not a flame,
Fredrik