ksh availability

[Gene Spafford]

I got some feedback on on my posting about not being able to afford the
cost of the Korn shell or Honey DanBer.  It was suggested that we're a
"shoestring" operation if we can't afford the few thousand dollars
required to license those items.

The following was discussed a great deal in net.cse over the past
year, so I feel very certain that we're not the only educational
institution in this situation:

We're a public university.  We're a public university in a state that
doesn't place a high priority on education (as is the case in most
states).  We're a public university in a state where the majority of
state and federal legislators didn't attend our school -- in fact, most
of them attended the rival university across-state.  Our
student-faculty ratios are too high, our equipment is outdated and
undersized, and we don't have any budget for software packages unless
some faculty member wants it for study under one of their grants.
We're not that different from most other educational institutions
around the country.  Only a few places have the funds to pay a couple
thousand a pop out of petty cash for software packages.  Here, we worry
if the general budget will have sufficient funds left so we can buy
paper for the last month out of each fiscal year.

Let me point out that we don't run the computing services on campus.
We only run the research machines and some of the teaching machines.
The main campus computing facility is two Cyber 855's running NOS.
Will the ksh run under NOS?  If so, maybe we can talk somebody in the
computing services department to budget for it.

We're not a shoestring operation here.  We have about 30 faculty
members, 200 graduate students (including about 50 PhD students), and
about 600 undergraduates.  We provide all of those students with a
fine, in-depth education even though the resources aren't available to
make it as complete as some would wish.  We don't teach Unix or C,
although some grad students and selected undergrads may be exposed to
it during some of their work.  We just happen to have not enough
funding for the number of students and the kind of quality we try to
provide.  It doesn't look like that will change anytime soon, for us,
or for other schools in similar situations.  Unless of course we can
convince the current administration that we're a vital part of the
defense program in this country and we can get budgeted a few hundred
thousand dollars for screwdrivers and coffee makers.

Further discussion on this topic should probably be in net.cse; I have
provided a "Followup-to" line to reflect that.
-- 
Gene "5 months and counting" Spafford
The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
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