Re: pricing

[Antony T Curtis]

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999 22:37:31 +0000, Fred Read wrote:

>WhiteMoor Studio wrote:
>> 
>> Dear sir/madam,
>> 
>> First, I am not a user of MySQL (yet?). But I have a question. 
>> Why do I have to pay a licence fee for a Microsoft OS while I 
>> don't have to pay for a non Microsoft OS?
>
>It is customary to charge a premium for handling hazardous 
>materials is it not?

Not forgetting that users of Microsoft software should be accustomed to
paying for software (if they haven't already pirated it).

>But seriously, generally speaking it costs more to set up a 
>machine to develop Windows applications [OS, compiler et al] 
>and that cost has recouped somehow. 

This is even true with commercial Unixes... For example AIX... IBM's
own C compiler (VAC or C++SET) is not cheap yet the GNU C compiler is
freely available and productes code nearly as good but without IBM's
bugz.. =)   And then all the server software: Apache, BIND, PHP, Samba,
Squid...  they're all FOC yet their equivalents on the Windows platform
are either unstable or expensive, most often both.

Of course, for commercial support, one always pays - no matter what the
platform is.


Regards

	Antony.

Creator of PowerMOD/2 and other such things...

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