On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 9:38 AM Jim Oberholtzer
<midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As Jon Paris pointed out, when WSCDi was included in the software cost for
the compilers, (It was never "Free") no one cared. As soon as it became a
separate product, then interest went way up.
Well, it's either ignorant, shortsighted, or disingenuous to somehow
come to the conclusion that unbundling and charging separately
*caused* the increased interest. I'm not saying you are espousing this
conclusion, because your very next comment is:
Part of that is due to feature/function, part of it is general awareness,
part of it was pure marketing.
So it seems you recognize that there are other factors at play. Which
makes me question the following:
Been there / done that / not gonna happen again........
Rebundling, or lowering the cost, or including one license, or any
number of other measures, if done TODAY, would NOT be the same thing
as including WDSCi THEN. As you just mentioned, there is a lot more
awareness today than there was then, and simply rebundling won't
somehow turn that off. The feature/function factor is big. Not only is
RDi vastly more capable than WDSCi, back then SEU supported all the
latest language features; today it does not. I know some people claim
that WDSCi always ran perfectly fine on hardware of the time, but I am
also 100% sure that I and others did NOT find WDSCi to run fine on our
machines of the time, whereas RDi runs fine (or at least comparatively
better) on our machines today.
It really irks me when people say "we did X before and it didn't work,
so why would we even think about doing X again now"?
Doing the so-called "same thing" and expecting different results is
NOT the definition of insanity. What's insane to me is behaving as
though conditions are somehow the same for all eternity. The world is
a different place now. Open source isn't just a niche thing anymore.
The current generation of programmers don't have the same
sensibilities or workflows as the programmers from WDSCi's day. (And
IBM does want to attract newer, younger programmers, right?)
I'm not saying that doing X now will *necessarily* work when X didn't
work before. But I am saying that assuming it *can't* work now, and
categorically rejecting it *because* it didn't work before is an
uncompelling and lazy argument.
John Y.
midrange.com
