Missing Man Pages

Dimitri Rotow dar at belltec.UUCP
Sat Sep 24 11:51:34 AEST 1988


There's been some questions recently about "missing" on-line man pages.  New
for UNIX System V Release 3.0 and subsuquent is AT&T's policy regarding man
pages.  It used to be that UNIX licensees got the man pages as part of thier
UNIX license. AT&T's new policy is to "unbundle" the UNIX man pages and sell
them to UNIX distributors at extra cost.  The cost is about $10,000 plus 
a continuing royalty, resulting in a per-copy hit at the end user level of 
about $45 to $95.

We've heard that most people would rather not pop the extra cost associated
with the man pages, especially since many people have complained that the
man pages just chew up disk space (yes, I know that many people disagree 
with this).  We'd be very interested in hearing how people feel about this
issue.  If you mail me direct over the next two weeks, I will summarize for
the net the results of the vote.

Dimitri Rotow  ~!pacbell!belltec!dar



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