*BSD News Article 3672


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!Germany.EU.net!unido!adagio!grog
From: grog@adagio.UUCP (Greg Lehey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: selling 386BSD (was Re: 386BSD on CD-ROM?)
Message-ID: <1848@adagio.UUCP>
Date: 15 Aug 92 07:20:44 GMT
References: <1992Aug11.190949.1496@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE> <1992Aug12.100430.3467@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE> <1557@hcshh.hcs.de>
Organization: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
Lines: 47

In article <1557@hcshh.hcs.de> hm@hcshh.hcs.de (Hellmuth Michaelis) writes:
>In <1992Aug12.100430.3467@Urmel.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE> kuku@acds.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph Kukulies) writes:
>
>i can understand chris. yesterday i saw an ad in the german "unix magazin",
>where a company named "tuttle design" sells 386bsd 0.1 on tape for 399,- DM,
>which is about 250 US$. they say in the ad, that a contribution to bill jolitz
>is contained in this price....
>
Well, DM 399 sounds rather high, but don't forget that people have to
make a living as well. As soon as you start advertising the stuff, you
*have* to charge money just to make ends meet. The smallest ad in UNIX
Magazin costs over DM 600; last time we put an ad in there, it led to
about 3 orders. And we sell our tapes for DM 200 - when you add in the
cost of the tape, we lost money on the deal. We came to the conclusion
that we should stop advertising.

>conclusion: in every piece of software, i will put an equivalent copyright
>	    notice in. i spend an enormous amount of time writing an pccons
>	    device driver (watch out for it), and i do not like it, if some-
>	    one else is making money with it.

As you see, nobody's making much money. The charge is not for the
software, just for the handling. I don't know what kind of copyright
notice would protect against that, even if it made sense.

>if anyone in germany thinks of buying from them, contact me, i will cut
>a tape for you if you contrib 250US$ (or whatever you can give) DIRECTLY
>to the jolitz's.

Sure thing. And if you put in the tape for free, I might even take you
up on it :-)

>don't misunderstand me, my contrib is on the way to bill & lynne, and if some-
>one sells 386bsd and gives ALL the money to the jolitz's, there is nothing
>wrong with it - i would like some sort of centralized version/revision 
>management for 386bsd >= 0.2, and in order to do it, they need money !

Don't misunderstand me. If you want 386bsd from me, you can call us up
and get it via uucp for nothing. But it costs more money than you
think to maintain archives and supply ``free'' software (yes, we
really do put that in parentheses in our literature). The FSF charges
$200 for their tapes, by the way.
-- 
Greg Lehey                       | Tel: +49-6637-1488              
LEMIS                            | Fax: +49-6637-1489
Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
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