PC/IX and Xenix: of Licenses and Multiusers

Guy Harris guy at rlgvax.UUCP
Tue Jun 26 15:28:27 AEST 1984


One point, and one question:

1) The AT&T binary sublicenses for UNIX are priced according to the number
of users on the system for which the sublicense is issued.  The single-user
license is *very* cheap (price starts at $100, after your first $1M of all
UNIX licenses it drops to $70, after your first $2.5M it drops to $40).
For 2-16 users it jumps to $250/$125/$50.  (These are the S3 prices, which
apply to PC/IX which is an S3 port.  I think the S5 prices are the same.
Nobody cares about the V7 prices for small systems because the S3 prices
are cheaper there and you can offer V7 or S3 for those prices.)  If IBM is
sublicensing PC/IX with a single-user binary license, you *may not* add
another user to the system; this means you may not hang a send/receive
terminal off any serial (or other) port on the machine.  (Anybody know
whether pseudo-ttys count - i.e., whether TELNET or "rlogin" has to be disabled
on single-user machines or throttled on multi-user machines?)

2) "The Xenix agreement is more severe, as I noted in my review...
because you are explicitly given permission to write in the margins of
the manual (but I cannot underline or markup the text???)..."

My, how generous of Microsoft.  Are the manuals you get marked "Property
of Microsoft?"  If not, I suspect there's no way they could stop you from
writing in the margins, underlining text, or drawing a "Kilroy was here"
at the top of every page.

	Guy Harris
	{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy



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