NFS as an add on product

[Anthony A. Datri]

tperala at ub.d.umn.edu (Tim Perala) writes:
>This company recently added NFS server support to the system.

>The rub is that they wany what I consider to a large sum of money to
>purchase this as an add-on product.

>I understand that they must be paying royalties to Sun Microsystems, but
>the cost (initial license plus maintenance) seems unreasonable.

Actually, I don't think they're necessarily paying royalties to Sun.  I
believe that Sun has made the NFS protocol public, and the sources for
their RPC seem to be public.  I think what happens is that some vendors
license Sun's implementation of NFS instead of writing their own.  HP
seems to have done this, and HP-UX seems to come with NFS as part of the
distribution.  Other vendors roll their own.

Anthony A. Datri @SysAdmin(Stepstone Corporation) aad at stepstone.com stpstn!aad