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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199603192305.QAA25103@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD be used in a commercial way?
To: hsu@freefall.freebsd.org (Jeffrey Hsu)
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 1996 16:05:16 -0700 (MST)
Cc: terry@lambert.org, chat@freefall.freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199603192114.NAA01635@freefall.freebsd.org> from "Jeffrey Hsu" at Mar 19, 96 01:14:15 pm
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> > > 	Only SVR4 (original AT&T) version need licenses. That is why
> > > 	Sun paid $85M to Novell.
> > 
> > Actually, Sun did it as a "royalty buyout".  If it were a fixed cost,
> > it would be "one time overhead", and the street price of Solaris would
> > have dropped immediately.  It didn't.
> 
> Seems like a very bad deal now, doesn't it, now that SCO has bought
> all of Unix for 80M?

Kind of an old message. 8-).

Yeah, well, Sun switched from SunOS to Solaris, too... there's no
accounting for taste.

It was a mistake to let the bean-counters classify the purchase,
since it damaged the end-user pricing of Solaris itself, since they
were trying to amortize a fixed cost as a capital invetment.  8-(.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.