bundling

[John Gilmore]

kell at gatech.edu (James K. Canty) wrote:
> it was sold on an 80 meg hard drive. The price of the aux system( and this
> is student pricing) is 2400-2600 dollars. To me this is ridiculous.
> Why can't I buy a third party hard drive ( quite a bit cheaper too ) and
> run aux on it? Are there any plans to unbundle this or what?

Apple announced that people could buy the right to make e.g. 100 copies
of A/UX and sell them on their own disks.  However, they will not let you
sell these copies mail-order.  This means you can kiss the hope of getting
A/UX on a reasonably priced disk goodbye; all the places that sell cheap
Mac disks sell them mail-order, so they can get enough volume to sustain the
low prices.

Apple will eventually release A/UX on (some large number of) floppies, but
I wouldn't hold my breath.  They "released" it on 80MB disks in February,
but you still can't buy it.

It could all be a conspiracy inside Apple to pretend to have Unix while
actually bending over backwards to nail Unix users to the wall.  I tend
to think that it's simple stupidity.  They don't *realize* that they are
pissing off the Unix community, who would be perfectly happy to buy
A/UX through the mail and support it themself, the way they do from all
the other Unix vendors.
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