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Date: Fri, 4 Jul 1997 04:26:07 -0700
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From: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
To: Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr>
Cc: XEmacs Developers <xemacs-beta@xemacs.org>
Subject: Re: Solaris dynamics?
In-Reply-To: <kigvi2rjd3e.fsf@jagor.srce.hr>
References: <199707031510.LAA08224@verve.canada.sun.com>
	<9707031753.AA04163@cfdevx1.lehman.com>
	<199707041011.DAA03398@xemacs.eng.sun.com>
	<kigvi2rjd3e.fsf@jagor.srce.hr>
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Reply-To: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>

>>>>> "Hrv" == Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@srce.hr> writes:

Hrv> Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM> writes:
>> But just because something is useful to some customers doesn't mean
>> it gets shipped.  Eventually the question "What about support?"
>> raises its ugly head.  This is likely the reason why, for example,
>> perl isn't shipped with Solaris.

Hrv> The company could always wash its hands off the unsupported packages
Hrv> (you know: distributed with NO WARRANTY blah blah...)

Hrv> It's only a small matter of determination.

I've used this argument myself, and it's unfortunately not very successful.

The counter-argument is that some customers see the very act of
providing software with the system as an implicit guarantee of
support.  There's no such thing as free software (from the vendor's
point of view).  Answering support calls is expensive, even when
the answer is "that is unsupported software".

This is likely the reason why no commercial Unix vendors ship any
recently developed free software.  In Sun's case, this is even more
severe - Sun has been funding Tcl/Tk development for a while, and
there is no sign (yet) of it shipping with Sun systems.

It is up to the Red Hats and Calderas of the world to prove that
customers want utilities like perl pre-installed.

Martin

