[MacPerl] software pricing (OT)

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

At 1:17 AM -0800 1/26/99, Jay Bedsole wrote:
>Compare this to unix applications that I've paid $100K for, that
>never crash... Moral - you get what you pay for???

Sometimes.  Sometimes (as in Open Source) you get far more.  For
commercial software, in any case, the revenue available to the
developer is expressed as "unit cost*sales".  A Unix package that
costs $100K and only sells 10 copies will bring in far less than
a PC package that costs 10M copies and sells for $50.

This is all obvious, but folks tend to get wrapped up in thinking
that "Unix (Mac) costs more".  For instance, I see industry "experts"
saying that NT workstations cost less than Unix workstations.  Well,
they certainly _can_ cost more, but they don't _have_ to.

My main server here is a generic PC (200 MHx Pentium), running FreeBSD
2.2.8.  I have it handling logins, fielding email (including POP3),
running several web sites, and supplying AppleShare volumes to our
Macs.  Oh yeah, I also use it for software development in Perl and Tk.

The FreeBSD distribution (4CDs!) is dirt cheap; the other software was
either on the discs or FTP'd via the automagical "Ports" facility.  I
have received a pile of free books, as a journalist, but a spanning
set of the critical texts could be purchased for a few hundred dollars.

Finally, like most *nix systems, the box only crashes when the power
foes away or a piece of hardware hiccups badly.  My G3, OTOH, crashes
at least weekly.  (The number is high because of lots of applications
and 24/7 operation; low because I am rather conservative about the
apps I put/keep on the box.)

-r
--
Rich Morin:          rdm@cfcl.com, +1 650-873-7841, http://www.ptf.com/~rdm
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