🚀 go-pugleaf

In response to the following statement

>>This means
>>that PEX clients are assumed of widely available, relatively 
>>vendor-independant and cheap (PEX-IS is free) servers.



Bill Glazier writes


>The second assumption you made is that because the PEX-SI is 'free' on the MIT tape, this means PEX products will be less expensive.  Untrue again.  In fact,
>as argued by Allen Akin in this space not too long ago, the PEX-SI is financed 
>by the dues vendors pay to the X Consortium (most large vendors pay $50K/year),
>and by special assessments as required. For the first PEX-SI, Sun Microsystems
>was paid about $750K by participating companies.  Since a new SI will likely
>be developed for 6.0, either the X Consortium will have to finance the effort,
>or participating companies will either donate manpower or dollars to fund
>it's development.  There's no such thing as a 'free' SI (or lunch). 


I don't follow your conclusion at all Bill. All this fellow said was that
there is a source of free PEX Servers. He made no connection between costs
of commercial PEX Servers and the fact that they're based on a free (no quotes)
SI. Yes in fact the vendors paid for the SI, but if they didn't pay for the
SI they would all have had to pay for individual implementations themselves.
Since most vendors leverage some or all of the SI code, they do acheive some
savings in their development costs. I would guess the same is true for OpenGL,
but it is not accurate or fair to compare the development cost of PEX to the
license cost of OpenGL. The cost of the PEX-SI now (and when 6.0 is available)
to the general public will continue to be $0.00, it is publicly ftp-able
software. For many folks this is the bottom line they're concerned with,
how much can I get it for, not who paid to develop it, or how much it cost
them..


	Personal Opinions

	Jay Hersh

--
Hopfen und Malz, Gott erhalts