[1321] in java-interest
Re: The Future of Java (and Sun)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rawn Shah)
Wed Aug 30 00:03:06 1995
From: Rawn Shah <rawn@rtd.com>
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 1995 17:40:14 -0700 (MST)
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950829182014.7150C-100000@jagor.srce.hr> from "Smiljan Grmek - KSI ZGB" at Aug 29, 95 06:30:58 pm
: According to an article in the Financial Times (jul 17) Sun intends to
: finance (by actual hardware donations) universities to develop serious
: freeware (text processors, spreadsheets and whatever non-computer people
: out there need). This will have the effect of significantly lowering the
: cost of a full system (which is at least 1/2 in software), freeing a lot
: of buying power for hardware.
:
: Quotes from the article:
:
: 'We are going to go to Berkeley and Stanford and MIT and universities
: around the world and assign each of them the task of developing one
: program ...'
:
: 'Imagine if you have 20m users of free Java wordprocessor and then you
: form a little company and charge a dollar a copy of the fourth version
: of the program ...'
This must be the latest in the line of jokes, right?
Somebody at Sun has been spending far too much time with
the GNU people. GNU produces great software, but for one it will never
ever develop into a commercial product not just because they don't want
to but because they won't do very well at all. Cygnus sells support for
GNU software but how many of you buy products or services on a regular basis
from Cygnus? What this line of thought is doing is basically saying that
we have given up on making money off of our products and will just
hope that a better world through very low priced software will pay all our
salaries without problems.
First of all 20m users will NOT be using a free Java wordprocessor. Even
if they do, $20M ($1 per copy) will in no way justify the cost of dev of
three copies. The cost of current hardware does not justify the costs of
the development of software, much of which costs as much as the dev of
some hardware.
:
: Smiljan Grmek
: KSI Zagreb
: -
: Note to Sun employees: this is an EXTERNAL mailing list!
: Info: send 'help' to java-interest-request@java.sun.com
:
--
Rawn Shah RTD Systems & Networking, Inc.
Vice President 4003 E. Speedway Suite 123, Tucson AZ 85712
rawn@rtd.com (520) 318-0696 FAX: (520) 322-9755
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