honeydanber uucp available

[Andy Tannenbaum]

To arms, to arms.

Sometime around the first of the year, without fanfare,
honeydanber uucp was made publicly available by AT&T.

Honeydanber uucp is the uucp system that many people inside the Bell
System use, and that many of us outside have been waiting for.  It's
named honeydanber after it's three main proponoents, Peter Honeyman,
Brian Redman, and Dave Nowitz, all one-time employees of the one-time
Bell System.

Anyway, honeydanber has been released by AT&T as:

	Basic Network Utilities Package Release 1.0

Here are the basic fees:

$5000	first CPU source license fee
$1000	sublicense fee
$250	per sublicensee binary fee

BNU is a real nice package, it's basically uucp with all the nits
preened out of it.  Everything is automatic, everything works, it has
the features you want, mail and files do not disappear, failures are
reported to the appropriate parties, efficiency hacks are all in
place, everything is configurable, it's just a win, trust me.
(BNU also has cu and ct which use the same comm routines as uucp,
finally.  It might have other goodies...)

Anyway, the prices are totally outlandish.  Let's say a fledgeling
UNIX startup has 1000 machines running uucp in the field.  That's
$250,000 we have to pay AT&T to upgrade our customer base.  It's
really not practical for us to unbundle uucp, since a functional uucp
already exists.  We can't support two differnet uucp's.

If I'm not mistaken, AT&T only charges $250 (tops) for a UNIX binary!
I (and the money people here at Masscomp) think that AT&T should
charge a much smaller per sublicense fee for BNU, if they charge one
at all.  We think that about $25/system is right.  Realize, this is an
upgrade to an existing software system which is currently distributed
without additional cost as part of all available UNIXes.

Masscomp really wants to distribute BNU, but we can't afford it, our
customers can't afford it and I don't think the story is any different
at other UNIX vendors.  It would be a shame to see honeydanber uucp
just lie there and rot because of ignorant losing pricing practices.

What to do?  Call the AT&T UNIX Software Info Hotline,
(800) 828-UNIX (828-8649) and ask about BNU and tell your account rep
that you want it but that the price is much too high.  Ask them what
you can do about it.  Write them letters.  You don't have to be a
purchasing agent for your company to call them, you can do it
yourself.

I want honeydanber to see the light of day.

The rep at AT&T who talked to me is Steve Vuksanovitch, you tell the
operator what company you work for and you might get him or someone
else.   If you want to send them snail mail, the address is:

AT&T Technologies
Box 25000
Greensboro, NC 27420

	Andy Tannenbaum   Masscomp  Westford, MA   (617) 692-6200 x274