On Wed, Nov 21, 2001 at 12:18:37PM +0100, Christian Holm Christensen wrote: > > I really meant the other way around. You couldn't buy a IBM 80286 > without getting DOS. Sure you could. For the 8086/8088-based IBM PC and PC-XT you could get either MSDOS or CP/M-86. The 80286-based IBM PC AT came with either MSDOS, CP/M-86, Xenix-286 (UNIX System-III ported to the i286 by Microsoft) or OS/2. > The issue is that HP, Digital, > IBM (and Sun today) made money off software - in an indirect way - by > bundling it with their hardware This is only an accounting trick. When we were buying SGIs, the software (OS+compilers) was always a separate line in the purchase order, so it was not automatically "bundled" with the hardware. However, most of the time, SGI gave us a 100% discount on the software. This shows that the big systems houses can shuffle the money around any way they want and they cannot easily see which part of their business is making or losing money. DEC got burned by this lack of good data big time, big time... > - much like M$ is making money due to > having convinced almost all retailers that they should bundle any i386 > with Windoze. The same way highwaymen "convince" me to give them all my money, "or else". > Compare this to another strategy: ... > ... you have a running system without having paid a single penny for > software. This is communism. It has been tried. Many times. It does not work. See: software is written by people, people have to eat, and to eat they have to be paid. No pay, no software. Simple, eh? -- Konstantin Olchanski Email: olchansk@triumf.ca Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Nov 21 2001 - 15:19:58 EST