Why?

[Curt Sampson curt@cynic.portal.ca]

In article <DE5.95Aug30084445@sws5.CTD.ORNL.GOV>,
Dave Sill <de5@sws5.ctd.ornl.GOV> wrote:

>I read through most of the Plan 9 web pages and was pretty excited at
>the prospect of running it on my PC, but when I saw the price I
>suffered a case of severe sticker shock. I can just imagine my wife's
>reaction if I told her I wanted to buy a $350 operating system simply
>because it's got some neat ideas in it.
>
>If $350 is a give-away, why not just sell it for $50-100 (to cover
>distribution costs)?

How do you know that $50-$100 would cover distribution costs?

I have fairly trivial sets of shell scripts and whatnot that I
would be perfectly happy to distribute freely, except that I don't
have the time to put together proper distribution packages. There's
a big gap between a system one can use in-house and one that one
can give to others, even if it's a research system.

Regardless, I don't see what the big problem with $350 is. There
are a lot of other areas of interest where you would have to justify
sums either similar or an order of magnitude larger, that to many
will seem unjustifiable.

Could you justify to your wife spending $250 on a dictionary? I
happen to own one (the Compact OED), and consider it an excellent
value.

Could you justify to your wife a $2500 bicycle? That's not an
unreasonable price for a good racing bike, even if it's not for a
pro racer.

And how on earth one could justify a $5000 computer anyway, I don't
know.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.