[Info-vax] New CEO of VMS Software

[Dan Cross]

In article <unegfi$1497f$2 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>On 1/7/24 13:57, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <une90c$1345e$1 at dont-email.me>, chrisq  <devzero at nospam.com> wrote:
>>> On 1/7/24 00:19, Dan Cross wrote:
>>>> In article <uncqas$pust$1 at dont-email.me>,
>>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo at nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2024 23:42:26 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I remember pretty specifically maximum user limits on versions of
>>>>>> commercial Unix.
>>>>>
>>>>> How would such limits be enforced? Presumably they only applied to some
>>>>> extra-cost "layered product", not to the core OS.
>>>>
>>>> No, they applied to the OS as a while.
>>>
>>> Don't remember that at all. Not on SGI, Sun or HPUX, nor Ultrix, fwir.
>>>
>>> Examples ?...
>> 
>> SCO, IIRC. https://www.tech-insider.org/unix/research/1997/0407.html
>
>Lol. I would not touch anything SCO. Fwir, they exist purely to
>litigate against others :-)...

That's certainly true now.  At one point they were a decently
respected ISV, though.  There's a reason the ELF standard and
ABI documents are still on sco.com.

I vaguely remember other System V having per-user licensing, but
the details are hazy now.  I blame AT&T.

AT&T as a corporate entity never quite got how to do Unix; they
wanted to treat it like their phone monopoly, but by the time
they were released from the consent decree and got into the
computer industry for real, that ship had sailed.  There's a
story about a bunch of Unix people: AT&T folks, other using
vendors, and Bill Gates in a meeting talking about licensing.
They were arguing about how much to charge per seat, per user,
for tools (troff, the C compiler, FORTRAN, etc).  Gates
apparently exploded at the rest and said, "you guys don't get
it.  Volume is the only thing that matters."  People often
forget that at one point, Microsoft was one of the biggest Unix
vendors on the planet, with Xenix.

The workstation vendors got it, but their hardware was too
expensive because they wanted to protect their gross margins,
at the expense of volume.

Ultimately, history shows that Gates was right: the commercial
Unix folks faded away because Linux gave a lower cost
alternative and, because it was green-field, there wasn't all of
this sticky IP goo to wade through (as there was with BSD and
the USL/BSDi/UCB lawsuit).  So even though it wasn't as good
when it came out, folks who just wanted cheap Unix were drawn to
it.  However, the situation might have been very different if
there'd been a reasonable, cheap version of Unix available for
the '386 in 1991.  In other words, had they concentrated on
volume, we might live in a very different world today.

I think this bears on VMS a bit today: VMS actually has some
really interesting technology in it, and it saddens me, but I
don't see how VSI is going to increase sales volume going
forward.

	- Dan C.