🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <CB57sD.5zL@park.uvcc.edu> jbryson@park.uvcc.edu (Jay Bryson) writes:

>Does the copyright message that gets
>printed out when you bring up IP and NFS say Univel, USL or Novell?
>None of the above.  For NetWare?  Novell.  If Novell is going to try
>and deploy a really low-cost UNIX, they're going to have to do it
>without the extra baggage of royalty payments to various technology
>providers that have provided these features to USL.

Licensing parts of the technology is certainly not an uncommon tactic.
Look at how many different copyright messages come up when you boot a
copy of ODT. This may have something to do with the reason why SCO
*can't* drop prices to the level of the Univel PE -- too much
money-per-copy going to Acer, Microsoft, SecureWare, etc.

But sublicencing does not *necessarily* make the price prohibitive. The
$250 Personal Edition contains a DOS-Merge product licensed from Locus,
a filesystem from Veritas, Motif from OSF, Fingertip Librarian from
somewhere else, etc. It's possible that the R&D costs of USL doing
these things in-house might have pushed the price of a PE up just as
much as the sub-licensing would have.

At this point it becomes a matter of negotiations. Did Univel swing a
better deal with Locus than SCO? Is Lachmann, in its stubbornness to
keep its TCP package too expensive for Univel to bundle it in Personal
Edition, going to get pushed aside if Univel goes elsewhere (or in-house)?
Considering the close ties between USL and Univel, it doesn't strike me
as being in Lachmann's long term interest to have Univel/USL go looking
for an alternate source of TCP/IP software. But then, I'm not in on the
discussions -- Lachmann, if it's smart, has something ups its sleeve.

These are the parts of the game where the quality of the technology has
*least* to do with what's going on, rather, who can be the best
horsetrader.
--
 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