AT&T Plan9 announcement

AT&T Plan9 announcement

[Scott]

Castor writes:
| 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.

My reading of the licence is that you can't post patches to the net,
which surely will limit its popularity.

AT&T Plan9 announcement

[Castor]

> 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

AT&T Plan9 announcement

[philw]

>From:	euler.Berkeley.EDU!serge
Break a leg darlings.

AT&T Plan9 announcement

[serge]

``Mr. Footi, a clarification please.''
--Marcy Rodes, Married with Children.
:-)

Lawrence.V.Cipriani@att.com
>To:	9fans
>Date:	Tue, 18 Jul 1995 21:23:52 -0400
>Subject: AT&T Plan 9 announcement
>
>"Plan 9 is not in competition with UNIX or Windows," said Paul 
>Fillinich, marketing manager for AT&T Software Solutions.

dmr@plan9.att.com:
>To:      9fans@cse.psu.edu
>Date:    Sun, 9 Apr 1995 00:23:34 -0400
>Subject: Plan 9 encumbrance
>
>Even the bureaucracy is aware that we're competing not only with Linux
>and BSDI and other low-cost BSD-derived systems, but also with
>commercial Unix, OS/2, and Windows of all styles.

Given that AT&T Plan9 announcement also later says:

>source code, is available for $350. [...]
>only the manuals, may be ordered separately for $125.  

I guess ``the wienies won'' --Geraldo, upon being dismissed from 20/20 :-)

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 binary only PC distribution is certainly very nice, but it's limited
in the number of hardware that it supports (besides being PC-only 1/2
:-), as evidenced by the letters in this mailing list.  If the source
was (more) widely / easily available we could have lots of people
working on extending it to support other platforms.  (Witness the
success of Linux, GNU, *BSD, etc.)  Is there any possibility of this
happening?  Even something like, e.g. some Motif reselling companies
contributing $1 (or $5?) for each sold product to the development of a
free Motif clone would be nice.  (Hm ... I wonder how VSTa is doing?)
This would be somewhat like, e.g. Sun's (ex?) policy of creating /
throwing new business over the wall so that the total volume increases
and both they and everyone else (seller and buyer alike) benefit.

Plan9: overact or die trying.
:-) :-) :-)