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65 thousand dollar question
Post 87119 by bakunin on Thursday 20th of October 2005 07:09:11 AM
10-20-2005
Quote:
Originally Posted by mud
Thank you all for your replies.
Now I know
Still tho... 65 G's... Ouch!!!
I suspect however, that many big companies have no qualms about paying that kind of money.
Sort of like paying for a $10,000 toothpick
Now I know
Still tho... 65 G's... Ouch!!!
I suspect however, that many big companies have no qualms about paying that kind of money.
Sort of like paying for a $10,000 toothpick
Now suppose you have a system with several TBs diskspace and hence (again, say) 300 disks attached to it. Since all of them have a life expectency of 5 years a disk failure will happen on average every 5yrs/300, which is about once every week. In this case you need a procedure on how to change disks while the system is running or risk one unplanned outage every week.
This is why a Mac with a G5 processor costs only half as much as an Intellistation from IBM with the same processor - the difference is not only IBMs surplus factor (that too, but not only that), but also many features to make operating a data center with some thousand Intellistations *possible* (as opposed to "a complete nightmare"), unlike a datacenter with some thousand consumer-grade MacFrags with a nice design and nothing more.
This principle can be extended to software as well, but there is even another point: software is expensive to develop and cheap to sell. That means writing a program costs some effort while selling a copy of it costs nearly nothing. Hence, when you build software for some outlandish platform where you don't expect to sell many copies the price will be relatively high (very high in some cases), because it is the same effort to write the OS and sell it 100 times as it is to write it and sell it 100.000 times. Maybe the UNIX you say was some realtime OS (most Unixes aren't real-time at all) or for some extremely rare hardware (massively-parallel for instance?) or something such.
bakunin
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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN
fsf-funding
FSF-FUNDING(7) GNU FSF-FUNDING(7) NAME
fsf-funding - Funding Free Software DESCRIPTION
Funding Free Software If you want to have more free software a few years from now, it makes sense for you to help encourage people to contribute funds for its development. The most effective approach known is to encourage commercial redistributors to donate. Users of free software systems can boost the pace of development by encouraging for-a-fee distributors to donate part of their selling price to free software developers---the Free Software Foundation, and others. The way to convince distributors to do this is to demand it and expect it from them. So when you compare distributors, judge them partly by how much they give to free software development. Show distributors they must compete to be the one who gives the most. To make this approach work, you must insist on numbers that you can compare, such as, "We will donate ten dollars to the Frobnitz project for each disk sold." Don't be satisfied with a vague promise, such as "A portion of the profits are donated," since it doesn't give a basis for comparison. Even a precise fraction "of the profits from this disk" is not very meaningful, since creative accounting and unrelated business decisions can greatly alter what fraction of the sales price counts as profit. If the price you pay is $50, ten percent of the profit is probably less than a dollar; it might be a few cents, or nothing at all. Some redistributors do development work themselves. This is useful too; but to keep everyone honest, you need to inquire how much they do, and what kind. Some kinds of development make much more long-term difference than others. For example, maintaining a separate version of a program contributes very little; maintaining the standard version of a program for the whole community contributes much. Easy new ports contribute little, since someone else would surely do them; difficult ports such as adding a new CPU to the GNU Compiler Collection con- tribute more; major new features or packages contribute the most. By establishing the idea that supporting further development is "the proper thing to do" when distributing free software for a fee, we can assure a steady flow of resources into making more free software. SEE ALSO
gpl(7), gfdl(7). COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1994 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this section is permitted without royalty; alter- ation is not permitted. gcc-4.3.0 2007-05-12 FSF-FUNDING(7)