Future direction of A/UX?

[Barry Shein]

>I have seen this suggestion before, with a reply from an Apple person
>giving downside reasons.  As I recall, the main points were liability
>exposure for false advertising if the third-party software didn't
>perform, and exposure to accusations of playing favorites from those
>not included on the list.

Argh, that's like saying they don't want to try to sell A/UX because
they'd have to pay income taxes on all the money they'd make.

Every major computer company I know of provides lists of products they
believe work with their systems. They can either spend some money to
verify that the products really work or disclaim that they do any such
checking (which of course lessens the value of the recommendation, but
doesn't open them to legal consequences unless there was WILLFUL
attempt to defraud, such as claiming they have tested its suitability
when in fact they haven't.) Simply collating and repeating the claims
of the sources does not transfer liability.

Sun, DEC, IBM etc salespeople love to hand you their third-party
product catalogs the first time they meet you. It seems to me even
Apple does this with MacOS.

And *every* company plays favorites (or, more precisely, excludes
non-favorites, show me some Emulex recommendations from DEC, Parity or
Trimarchi recommendations from Sun or Amdahl recommendations from
IBM!) That's not sue-able as long as they make no claims that they
will include everyone and anyone, and they never do ("mumble reserves
the right to refuse...")

Maybe Apple's position on this is being misrepresented here.


-- 
	-Barry Shein, Software Tool & Die

There's nothing more terrifying to hardware vendors than
satisfied customers.