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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!think.com!yale.edu!jvnc.net!nuscc!ntuix!eoahmad From: eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) Subject: Marketing BSD(was UNIX Lite?) Message-ID: <1992Jun29.021715.10631@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> Organization: Nanyang Technological University - Singapore References: <C8VG6U7@taronga.com> Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1992 02:17:15 GMT Lines: 57 In article <C8VG6U7@taronga.com> peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes: : In article <1992Jun27.165905.27527@wobble.uucp> dlu@wobble.uucp (Doug Urner) writes: : >I'm curious. How do the license terms from BSDI prevent you from : >"show[ing] everything to a CS student" or from doing a port to another : >machine (assuming you are willing to pay BSDI the $200 for a right to : >copy)? : : Because I want to sell UNIX Lite (or see someone selling UNIX Lite) for $50 : a copy. ($50 being the effective price for OS/2: IBM has made the entrance : fee so low there's no alternative). Why not sell 386BSD Unix for $25.00 because it lacks vital features at the moment. Selling for $50 would kill it let alone $1000.00 : : I'd do that even if I only made $5 or $10 a copy over the license fee, but : I'm not going to take a loss. : : Well, once 386BSD settles down this may be possible. So, what does UNIX : Lite have to include? : : DOS Emulation. A SVR3 ABI (at a minimum), though the stock software should : not need it: if you have to load an emulator to run Xenix or SCO or Dell : binaries that's OK. If these are physically unbundled, that's OK too. : : Small size: a usable "2-user" (really, single-user plus UUCP) system on no : more than 2 1.2M floppies and no more than 2M of RAM. A single-user boot you : can do work with on one floppy, including a RAM-disk driver that you can : load and "boot" into so you can get up on a 1-floppy system and do work. : : These are market requirements for the low end. Maybe not for doing real : work, but for providing a platform so that people can depend on being : able to get the system up after a disk crash to the point they can run : the equivalent of Norton Utilities. The current difficulty of putting : a UNIX system back together without a spare hard drive is a real obstacle. : `-_-' By the time you finish those developments IBM and MSDOS would have done something even better. Maybe do whatever BSD386/386BSD can do at the same or similar efficiency. Who cares about efficiency when P5/586 comes up at todays 386 prices. I can't help intervening again because I got a strange feeling the participants of the saving BSD discussions seem to miss the customers needs. Most do not even know what a customer is!. Again I have lots of ideas but scared to contribute and feel it a waste of time. Why don't you people read about the success stories of Bill Kildal with CP/M and Bill Gates with MSDOS. -- Othman bin Ahmad, School of EEE, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2263. Internet Email: eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg Bitnet Email: eoahmad@ntuvax.bitnet