Mach from mt Xinu

[Richard Foulk]

>> Of course, if you had taken the time to *read* what I wrote, instead
>> of gleefully spewing out your ad hominum brayings, you would have
>> noticed that I said: ``From what I understand of your
>> announcement...''...
>
>OK, so if that's the difference, I gather one makes an insult acceptable
>by preceding it with "From what I understand..."?  After all, you concluded
>that "from what you understand" mt Xinu is just a very expensive floppy-
>duplicating service which doesn't really provide support - and that is a
>deep insult to some very good people.
>
>Does this mean you would not have been offended if Chip had written instead,
>"From what I understand, you don't know jack shit..."?  [...]

This is a very unfair re-interpretation (out of context) of what was said
in the original posting.  Please take it easy Dick, and pay attention.

The "From what I understand ...", was in reference to the Mach
announcement that was posted earlier in this thread (not a reference to
Mr. Withrow's total worldly knowledge, or lack thereof).  Here's a
larger fragment of that text to put things back into perspective:

	"From what I understand of your announcement, the services you are
	providing for the purchase fee are:"

Mr. Withrow made some very good points.  He may not have stated them in
a way amenable to all, but what do you expect -- they are fairly
controversial.  Considering how contrary his ideas are to the vendors
current way of doing business I can see how they would prefer not to
hear them or see them discussed in public.

It's my opinion that somewhere between what Mr. Withrow suggests and
what SCO, ISC, mt Xinu, et al, currently practice is an approach to
software licensing and support (or bug fixing if you prefer) that is
fair and reasonable.

It is apparently the opinion of many, that the current practice is
neither fair nor reasonable.

Current licensing practices are still too closely tied to the old
mainframe market approach where there was little competition once you
bought into a particular machine and OS, and a license agreement was
pretty close to extortion.

It sounds like mt Xinu is coming somewhat closer to reasonableness than
the other guys, so maybe it's a little unfair to single them out, but
at some point soon this whole mess has got to change.

What ticks me off about the whole thing is that I think the vendors and
screwing themselves (and the rest of us) out of a much larger market by
being so prickish.

Maybe GNU or 386BSD will force them to think again.


-- 
Richard Foulk		richard at pegasus.com