AT&T and Unix

[John McNamee]

>The mass market of UNIX will consist of people who have no need to
>mess around with their O.S. internals.

Who said anything about the mass market? I never said I was a member of
the mass market. But since you bring it up, my view is that since the mass
market is where most of the users will be, that is where AT&T should plan
to make their money. AT&T could sell cheap sources to hackers, the hackers
would generate software that the mass market might want to run, and thus
more people will buy Unix based machines. AT&T would sell more Unix licenses
because more members of the mass market would be interested in machines
running Unix based on the software dveloped by the hackers. Everybody wins.
But this will never happen, and I'm not asking it to. I would be happy if
AT&T would charge people based on their intended use: $40k if you intend to
make money off Unix and cheap if you only want it for hacking. My personal
interest is not making money selling Unix software.

>...Adaptations of UNIX to these
>packages will be made by OEMs and VARs who will pay the license fee
>and amortize the cost over all the systems they will sell.  You too
>can form a company to remarket UNIX...

But I dont want to remarket or sell anything. I'm not in this as a business.
Thats the point that everybody misses. I just want a nice environment to hack
in on my home machine. Let AT&T charge a fortune to the people who intend to
make money off of Unix.

>I would love a $40,000 automobile, but I do not gripe at Ferrari for
>not selling it to me for $500.

I think thats a bad analogy. You cant compare software with physical items.
If Ferrari were to sell you a $40k car for $500 they would take a loss on
materials and not be able to sell it to smebody else. If AT&T were to sell
Unix sources for $500 they would still make money on the materials and still
be able to sell Unix to other people.
--

			John McNamee
		..!decvax!philabs!sbcs!bnl!jpm
			jpm at BNL.ARPA