Unbundling (was: Open Software Foundation)

[Barry Shein]

From: gwyn at brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
>I don't know what V7 has to do with anything, but the main reason for
>bundling "UNIX software" into separate packages is that small systems
>simply don't have room enough for all the software that might reasonably
>be considered "UNIX software", e.g. DWB, WWB, DMD, network utilities,
>software development facilities, etc.  Thus instead of simply specifying
>"UNIX", you need to specify what packages you actually need.

That's a good reason to design the installation procedures to allow
someone to install only what they want on-line but no reason at all to
not send it to them or charge differentially. For example, most BSD
distribution tapes put things like games and the versatec fonts in a
separate tar file and scripts to install indicated that extracting
them is optional.

The classic excuse was "but I don't pay for the pieces I don't need".

When AT&T unbundled nroff and the man pages there was no drop in
charges that I was aware of, only an optional added charge for these
features I used to get bundled. I suppose some twisted reasoning could
claim that to be not paying the extra price, assuming that if it were
bundled I would have to pay the sum of those prices for the single
package. One unfortunate error was not even mentioning that these had
become unbundled, we only discovered this after frantically searching
our SYSVR2 tapes and assuming there must be some mistake so called...

At any rate, it's "what the market will bear", and it was not borne
here, this was one of several reasons we avoided SYSV like the plague.

We voted with our feet.

I'm disturbed by the unbundling by Sun of Pascal and Fortran. Some of
those were just casual products for a lot of our users, they were used
occasionally (eg. Fortran in Computer Science.)

I feel like the vendor is changing the rules in the middle of the game
after we've committed to the hardware. I sincerely hope they don't
think users here lack choices, I'm already fighting off various
workstation and PC vendors trying to keep things reasonably
supportable but this can make it impossible.

There's gotta be a better way. Charging hundreds of dollars in
licensing fees per-cpu is going to kill the whole workstation thing
and drive us back to time-sharers for all but the wealthiest users.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University