Giant Price Hikes for System V Release 4

[Dimitri Rotow]

In article <3001 at sugar.uu.net>, karl at sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
> ...spoke with a salesperson at Bell Technologies yesterday and was told
> that System V/4 is going to cost about $1300 and there isn't likely to
> be an upgrade for V/3 people.  This person claimed that AT&T had super 
> jacked-up the rates and similar price hikes will occur from all other vendors.
> 

What's been announced (and now shipping) is System V/386 Release 3.2, the 
wonderful new release from AT&T that has wonderful new features (Xenix
compatibility, for example) and a wonderful new price.

Under the original System V Release 2 licensing, the 1-2 user license for
ALL of UNIX started at $50 and the unlimited number of users license was
$150.  In Release 3.0, the pricing changed so that the $50/$150 included
everything but the Networking (RFS) stuff, which cost $30 extra.  In Release
3.2, the Development utilities are now unbundled and cost an additional $80.

When you add up the pricing, the total royalty owed to AT&T by large volume
distributors has almost doubled.  Because of the margins which need to be
in between the large volume distributors, the wholesalers, the retailers or
end point VARs and the final end user, the doubling in price by AT&T tends
to have a disproportionate effect on end user list prices.

In our case, we have repriced the UNIX line not only to reflect the change in
UNIX cost from AT&T, but also to incorporate the extra items now included (we
bundle in media kit, now, for example) as well as reseller pricing tiers to 
reflect the change in distribution policy from direct sales to sales through
resellers.

No pricing has been announced from AT&T on Release 4 (the merger between SUN
and AT&T), nor have we announced any pricing either.  Given the history of
AT&T's price increases as there are more mouths to feed, I am not optomistic.
We and numerous other companies strongly opposed the notion of either increasing
UNIX license fees or charging extra for the development utilities or RFS.


Dimitri Rotow