🚀 go-pugleaf

evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) writes:

>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.

It's not Motif, it's Moolit, since USL never could do a deal with OSF
they were happy with.

>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.

It's interesting to speculate who owns the "Lachman" piece.  Lachman
was sold to Interactive, which was sold to Kodak, which then sold of
part to SunSoft and the other part to SHL Systemhouse. Ron Lachman
then bought back a piece from SHL, so there's a company called
Lachman again. Now which one of these pieces is getting the royalty
for TCP from USL?  Anybody know?

I think I've mentioned this before, but the TCP royalty, at least in
the stock USL contract, is a funny one - it's based on a percentage of
the sales price of the system (if bundled) or OS (if sold separately),
not a fixed volume-discounted fee.  This was done to avoid burdening
the low-cost systems too heavily, but I think it just ends up being a
pain...

-- 
Mats Wichmann
Unisoft Corporation
mats@unisoft.com (or mats@netcom.com)