AT&T Plan9 announcement

[Castor Fu castor@drizzle.Stanford.EDU]

> Still, I would hate to see Plan9 / Brazil die out because of this.
> I.e. who's going to shell out $350 when you can get Linux (and even OSF
> Mach) source for free and Windose (:-) for ~$70 (and Sun's Spring for
> ~$70)?  For comparison purposes, for $350 you can get a cheapo 386
> system that will run Plan9.  (Even $125 for manuals seems a little
> steep. Hm ... I wonder if you can get just the sources without the
> manuals for $350 - $125 = $225? 1/2 :-)

The manuals are available via WWW for free, right?

At my work, our primary contract is providing support for AIX internals.
That's why, (to the chagrin of our product developers) we call ourselves
The Kernel Group.  Most of the linux users at our company
have never even bothered to LOOK at the linux source.  They use it like
a  black box.  It's just not interesting enough, and probably sounds
too much like work.

I'd bet most linux users don't look at the source either.  For these  people,
a binary dist is just fine.

For the others, the hordes in the universities will probably have
access to them, because it's so cheap that most universities will probably
get it.  For geeks like me, I will probably buy it, just because I want
to see and play with the source.

I don't think the price is unreasonable.   The licensing terms are generous
enough that the university community will be included, and yuppies with
too much money on their hands will be able to buy it also.

Incidentally, the licensing terms AT&T has announced for commercial use,
($100K + 2%/machine or 20% of cost of software)  are sufficiently low that 
you could probably make money selling binary distributions of Plan 9 for $100,
and providing rudimentary support.

	-castor