CONSENSYS SysV R4

[Albert Langer]

In article <285F4D54.110F at telly.on.ca> evan at telly.on.ca 
(Evan Leibovitch) quotes others and writes:

>>>This week's UNIX Today has a full page add for Consensys announcing
>>>their 386/486 SysV R4.  $395 for an unlimited license (in quantities of
>>>5).  Development system, networking and X-Window are extra.

>The product itself is deliberately designed to be bare bones. No docs
>outside of release notes and installation -- the rest is the Prentice
>Hall R4 set. I don't believe the company will do much of its own
>development work, or supply any bug fixes except what it gets from AT&T.

>The company wants desparately to get away from selling to end users (and
>low-volume resellers), as it just doesn't have the staff (sales *or* support)
>to deal with lots of calls. Their intention is that by only selling the
>packages in minimum quantity five, they'll avoid dealing with the unwashed
>masses, but that resellers would find the price too attractive to pass up.
>That's where Arrow gets involved, to sell the single orders.
>
>It's still a good price, but I'll prefer to pay a little more to stick
>with the good relationship I've had with ESIX. Others may find the bare
>bones approach more attractive.

Sounds attractive to me. Free support from the net seems more worthwhile
than paying resellers in advance and hoping anyway. Only thing that
worries me is the "extra". Can one easily put together the missing bits
from free offerings on the net? I gather X386 solves the X-Window
problem and I assume that include files must be provided just for
kernel reconfiguration - how long before gnu amounts to an adequate
development environment (and is anybody planning to hurry along the
necessary libraries in order to take advantage of these "bare bones"
offers)? How about networking? Is that easily covered from the stuff
available on the net?

I'm seriously interested in the advantages of SVR4386 at that price
(especially being able to port lots of BSDish software from the net
with less hassles). Are there 4 others out there and/or anybody 
willing to play "reseller". I wouldn't like to try and provide the
missing bits by myself. Are there others out there willing to work
together on putting out a "release tape" with both source and binaries
of everything needed to make this offer fully competitive with the
others available. (Perhaps including some neatly indexed newsgroup
FAQs and messages as "support").

Two problems though.

a) I would like 4.0.3 (and subsequent upgrades at nominal cost).
b) I would like to be able to add VP/ix or similar for a reasonable
surcharge. (Can one use the 3.2 version?)

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