Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 10:08:25 +0100 From: James Mansion <james@wgold.demon.co.uk> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...) Message-ID: <3355E889.C84@wgold.demon.co.uk> References: <Your message of "Wed, 16 Apr 1997 21:15:05 CDT." <199704170215.VAA15005@argus> <3.0.1.32.19970417013405.00ba9290@sentex.net>
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Mike Tancsa wrote: > > At 09:14 PM 4/16/97 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > >> i'll add another few items to my list from last night... > >> > >> 1). chop the price in half to $19.95. > > I agree that this price cut seems pointless, but for different reasons I guess. Twnety bucks isn't a lot of money. It might buy you a few burgers, but its no more than a half-decent claret. Big deal. Compared to the commitment to partition hard disks, find 500MB of space for a full install, track the changes, learn the system, not to mention sit there installing and configuring the damn thing, $20 is hardly an obstacle to anyone. $200 is probably a bigger deal, though personally I'd pay it if I thought I was going to get something that worked well (read: decent pthread support and a C++ compiler that understands exceptions and templates well, though that's probably just my personal focus). > Although I agree price and sales dont always inversely correlate, there are > other mitigating factors as well: i.e. the general increase of the people > and companies being on the Internet. I suspect that (and the fact that > BSD/OS an excellent product) had more to do with BSD sales rather than just > people's perception of quality correlating to price. However, I am sure > some market segments would be more prone to this than others. A lot of our > really big corp customers who look to expand their net presence ask us for > recommendations. When we tell them about FreeBSD they look at us funny > when we tell them its free... Typically, their response is "You mean I am > going to trust my million dollar a week business to some free software ? No > way! Whats the number for SUN again ?" I suppose however, if we told them > FreeBSD was in fact $2000, plus another $1000 a year for fixes, they would > probably seriously consider it. However, our smaller business customers I don't think that's why people go with Sun or NT. *I* wouldn't run a business off FreeBSD, but I'd happily run a web site, news server, maybe even router or DNS server, off it. I might even use one for serving the excellent perforce VCS (deserved plug). To me the core aspect of most businesses is data, and (like Linux) FreeBSD doesn't cut it in the DBMS department. If you want business to take, note, you'd be better having a lousy web and news server, and a great database server. And you'd need a growth path beyond uniprocessor Intel, which free UNIXen (including Linux, as far as I'm concerned) don't have now. Trusting a business to NT has nothing to do with router performance, innd performance, apache vs iis performance - and everything to do with SMB file and print performance and SQLServer. Of course, there's more to having a great DBMS than a PostGres port that is 'nearly there', or even a great product from 3 guys in a shed. You *need* the roll-forward/roll-back recovery to work, and you *need* to have confidence that the data doesn't get corrupted, and no simple eval will tell you that, while knowing that the product has been in the field for 5 years already might give some comfort. As an example: I might happily build a system with, say, Solid as the core DBMS. But to sell it, I would probably have to sell it as an anonymous black box turnkey solution - even evangelising about the product is likely to be counter-productive. > are quite open to it. To them, what matters is that it works, is > reasonably priced, and is secure. For them, shaving $20 off the price is > not an issue. > > ---Mike > ********************************************************************** > Mike Tancsa (mike@sentex.net) * To do is to be -- Nietzsche > Sentex Communications Corp, * To be is to do -- Sartre > Cambridge, Ontario * Do be do be do -- Sinatra > (http://www.sentex.net/~mdtancsa) * James
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