From: woks4000@mailszrz.zrz.tu-berlin.de (Wolfgang Ksoll)
Subject: Re: GLX? OpenGL?
Organization: DATA SERVICE Berlin
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 11:54:11 GMT

In article <1992Sep2.221854.11703@odin.corp.sgi.com> bglazier@buffalo.asd.sgi.com (Bill Glazier) writes:
>
...
>
>For the Unix hacker needing to screw around with source code, the fact
>that PEX can be ftp'ed for no charge is a good thing.  But a mainstream
>market is not driven by end users who need to have free access to source code.
>No one complains in the Mac market that Quickdraw isn't freely available in source form.  Same with GDI and Windows.  In fact, the majority of X Window
>users probably won't want source code.  They just want applications that run
>under X.  Many of the places that want source are universities.  OpenGL
>source is available for $500 to them.
>
>The argument that 'PEX is free' is terribly misleading.  It clouds the real
>issues in the discussion.  
>
Bill,
I think you have some wrong assumptions of what is happening on the scene.
Your opinions are biased on financial aspects and oversee some important
technical aspects. I will give you some examples that you can proof your
opinions.

My company is a system integrator. We set up workstation environments
for hundreds and thousands of users. I want to protect the investment
of my customers as far as possible. We provide only commercial software
at normal licence fees so that a vendor can develop his software. But when
I design a new system I must know what is in the pipeline under development.

We sell only workstations of one manufacturer but we place them in open
environments (heterogenous). Two days after MIT released X11R5 I had it on 
my machine, just to look what is coming up. Those days my manufacturer provided
only X11R3, one year later I have only X11R4. But I have to make decisions
whether I want to point my customers to Codepage 850 or ISO 8859-1. therefore
I have to know where the industry goes. My manufacturer also provided
PHIGS on X, but I have to look whether PEX as standard is a walkable way.
Another parameter is the fontserver mechanism which allows me to save
disk space. the free MIT release is a way to see a year before products
find their way to the market place what is going on.

This process was customer driven upset by the MIT consortium and is just
the opposite of the process that a vendors develops a product and wants
to bring it to an industry standard by licensing it to other vendors.
This has been so with SNA, MSDOS and GL. There have been many perturbations
when other vendors licensed only a subset of GL and customers noticed
that SGI-developers had hardcoded their applications to fontmanager and window-
manager which were not part of the agreement. This was not open.

If you state that your next GL is an OpenGL you should give technicians
the possibility to take a look to the standard (not the product) as soon as
possible. Otherwise I have no reasons to treat it as other marketing
announcements like OSF/1, Windows-NT, ACE and other coming soon products.

Take a break and think! ;-)

My personal opinion: you will earn more money and you will have more market
share in a real open environment.



Wolfgang Ksoll           woks4000@mailszrz.zrz.tu-berlin.de
DATA SERVICE Berlin, Ansbacher Strasse 16, W-1000 Berlin 30, Germany
Phone: +49 (030) 219 007 - 32 FAX: - 39