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On Mon, 1 May 1995, Tony Tancredi wrote:

> > Companies like IBM and DEC pay  substantial fees to sell
> > binary-only copies and must return all bug fixes  and most
> > enhancements.
> 
> Is it the difference between 'most enhancements' and 'all
> enhancements' that causes IBM and DEC pay substantial
> fees to sell binary-only copies?  If IBM and DEC returned all
> enhancements and published a path to the source code
> could they sell the binaries without a license fee?

IBM paid several million dollars to get a "Certificate of Authenticity"
which meant that every known contributor that could be contacted 
certified that their work was original and that they consented to private 
use (for substantial consideration ($$)).  They then ported everything 
they could, then added internationalization.  This enabled them to 
support the old EBCDIC applications (as a foreign language), and also 
support Asia, Eastern Europe, and India.  I did the port/enhancements for 
X11R5 personally. (After SoftTronics, before Dow Jones).

Unfortunately, when bug fixes started coming in from the field faster 
than they could be installed and tested by IBM, many of the "Minor 
Applets" were redistributed as "unsupported software" which means IBM
might send you an upgrade once/year and you can get the rest directly
from MIT.

Mainframe managers were reluctant to use unsupported software until they 
realized that they had the equivalent of the "VTAM Exit Lists" (One of 
the best kept secrets at IBM).  IBM eventually laid off the man 
responsible for RACF security (a personal friend of mine I hope to see 
him again in August).

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm not exactly "some crack-pot on the net" 
:-)

	Rex Ballard
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon May  8 23:19:14 1995