Unix for *how much*?

[Phil Ngai]

In article <839 at ncoast.UUCP> bsa at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery) writes:
>> A single user binary only license costs $60. That's cheaper than wordstar...
>
>What comes with it?  Certainly not ksh; I would also doubt csh.  (Heck, at that
>price I would even doubt that sh came with it!)  I also assume 8088.  Memory?

I believe that currently ksh is not part of System V and would not be included.
sh is part of System V and is included. As far as I know, csh is derived
from sh; if you get permission from the University of California then you
are all set as far as licensing. See the software schedule from ATT (in
our case, it was attached to document Sys. V-Corp.-030183-1) if you have more
questions on which utilities are included.

Note that I'm not talking about a "product" in the sense of PC-DOS, I'm
talking about the ATT license. You still have to come up with the binaries
themselves. If you already had a source license then you can generate the 
binaries yourself but you need a binary license for each machine you 
concurrently run the binaries on. This issue comes up at large sites 
where you might have one source machine and many binary machines and is
probably the most common case where binary only licenses are sold.

If you don't have the $43,000 source license, you have to find someone to
sell you binaries. They don't have to sell you the license if you already
have one but most vendors would probably prefer to sell you both binaries
and a license. In any case, their cost under the arrangement which yields
the lowest incremental cost (but requires the greatest capital outlay)
is $60 per 1-2 user system for the ATT binary only license. This information
is from the schedule for UNIX System V, Release 2.0 Version 1, O-040184.

It does not appear that ATT cares which processor, 8088 or 68000, or
how much memory you use, 1M or 64K.

If IBM charges $995 for PC/AT Xenix, only $60 goes to ATT. This doesn't
make the software any cheaper but at least you know how much money is
going into whose pockets.
-- 
 Yuck! This coke tastes different!

 Phil Ngai (408) 749-5720
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