SYSVR4 Upgrade

[dar]

SVR4 has a new licensing structure, with new royalties due
to AT&T.  For most binary sublicensors, the cost of providing
UNIX plus TCP plus NFS plus X, dev tools, etc, has been 
cut in half by AT&T.  That's the good news.  The bad news
is that the max discount for *very* high volume sublicensors
tops out at 60% instead of the old 80%. That makes the price
cut a wash for very high volume sublicensors.

Another point of bad news is that AT&T doesn't give any credit
for pre-4.0 royalty payments towards 4.0 licensing.  My personal
opinion is that this is a reasonable position given the dramatic
increase in content and capability that 5.4 represents.  For
much of the system, 5.4 is a total, much needed re-write and
AT&T deserves to get compensated for the effort.

So..., the 5.4 UNIX vendors who are giving discounts to former
3.2 buyers are taking care of their customers out of their own
pockets.  Intel's distributors will ship the 5.4 developers' 
system to any former 3.2 user (even non-Intel 3.2) for $399 for 
the 1-2 user version sans full documentation.  I think the 
intent for most of the 5.4 vendors who are giving discounts
is to make it easier to support the customer base by consolidating
on the new porting base as soon as possible.

Dimitri Rotow

PS - Since I travel a lot these days my comm latency is
creeping up to almost three weeks.  Sorry for any delays
in email response.