Re: BDI install disk for EMC

> I suppose one question is to ask why you would expect this group to
> fund your learning curve.

TANSTAAFL. If you buy from a for-profit vendor, you will pay for it
one way or another. Where do you think those $7,000/seat price tags
come from on the "real" packages? How can you shop for price and
value when the vendor puts up such a smokescreen?

What I aim to convince you is that I offer an excellent price and an
excellent value, I will do so in the future, and I will back those
claims up with source code and transparent accounting.

> If you're really serious about EMC, do some homework and develop a
> knowledge base that's useful to other people.

In this case, the knowledge base I'm offering is 10 years of Unix
wrangling in academic, high-tech, and financial trading floor
environments. I propose to build a one-cd EMC solution that's as easy
to use as possible.

> The one case I'm aware of where the user community funded an open
> software development project was the port of the UPS debugger to
> Solaris. But the guy who did that had already built it and released
> it to the public. Everyone loved the product and desperately wanted
> it ported to Solaris, so they chipped in to cover his time.

The user community should think really hard about what it wants. If
it will only buy from commercial vendors who spin fairy tales and tell
customers they are getting something for nothing, those are the sort
of vendors it will get. Now, those certainly aren't the kinds of
vendors *I* want to buy from, nor is that the kind of vendor I want to
be. Does *this* community want a vendor who's honest about cost?

> The difference in his situation was he already had a track record of
> producing a wonderful, useful program.

I understand that I have more sales work to do before you recognize
what abilities I bring to the table.


A member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) http://lpf.ai.mit.edu
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Brian Bartholomew - bb@... - www.wv.com - Working Version, Cambridge, MA