Showcase Distribution

[Brian Sturgill]

> From: anns at razy.esd.sgi.com (Ann Sydeman)
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
> Subject: Showcase Distribution
> Message-ID: <93515 at sgi.sgi.com>
> Date: 26 Mar 91 00:31:44 GMT
> 
...
> I understand the need and desire to be able to access this software for
> free and have it now. Showcase is a very useful tool. For two main reasons,
> we will not make it availale via anonymous ftp: customer support and network
> issues. Showcase IS a supported product. The Technical Assistance Center 
> (aka the hotline) does their best to answer questions as efficiently 
> as possible. It is unfair to ask them to support a product which has been 
> released without documentation. Also, but perhaps less importantly, the 
> Showcase images are large, about 7 Mbytes, and contain many components- 
> executables, help files, and other support files.  We neither want to tie 
> up the network transferring these large files to many sites, nor have to 
> support bad installations or corrupted data.
These excuses do not seem well founded.

You could make images of the documentation available via ftp too.

People regularly transfer that much data.  CMU currently sends the
entire MACH operating system distribution to sites over the network.
The entire X distributions (much bigger than 7 megs) is available from
MIT via anonymous ftp.

Apple makes all of their Tech Notes available via
anonymous ftp (about 3 megs).  Apple made the last few of there OS
distributions available via anonymous ftp.  (5+ megs).
These distributions were released without documentation.

As to "nor have to support bad installations or corrupted data",
perhaps SGI networking has this sort of problem (though my experience
is that it doesn't), but this being a real problem strikes me as most
unlikely.  The entire idea behind networking protocols like TCP is that
data arrives reliably and uncorrupted.

If it SGI's intention to use Showcase as bait for new purchases, they should
simply say so and let things fall where they will.

> 
> Showcase was developed with the needs of our customers in mind. It provides
> badly needed basic productivity tools. I hope the positive side of receiving 
> such useful software for negligible, or no, cost outweighs the frustration 
> of having to wait a little while or pay $100. 
Seeing as normal paid for software distributions from SGI takes several months
I suspect that 'a little while' is an understatement.

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> 	Ann
Brian
-------------
Brian Sturgill
brian at cs.utah.edu
(Yet another customer unhappy about having to pay SGI for buggy versions of X.)