Re: AN IMPORTANT MESSEGE FROM SYMBOLICS SOFTWARE SUPPORT

[Chris Lindblad <cjl%ai.mit.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 18 Aug 89 11:24:01 MDT
    From: andreas@boulder.colorado.edu (Andreas C. Lemke)

    Nobody asks for altruism.  But when I buy a software product, I pay a
    certain price for it.  When it turns out that the product I got for my
    money doesn't work and I have to pay additional money before I get a
    working product, then this doesn't seem fair to me.

Well, what if I'm willing to buy a software product "as is", and I know that
any bugs in it I'll have to life with.  I don't care if anyone at Symbolics is
fixing bugs in it.  I think I should have to pay an "as is" price.

Now you want to buy a product, but you want all the bugs in it to be fixed
pronto.   Your price is the "supported" price.   The "supported" price is the
"as is" plus periodic fees for software support (since then you could switch
over to an "as is" mode any time you want).

What doesn't seem fair to me is that you want your "supported" price to be the
same as my "as is" price.  You want a more expensive to produce product than I
do, but you want it to cost the same as my "as is" price.  I would find it
quite unfair if I wouldn't be able to buy an "as is" product, just so the
cheapest price on the price list for a piece of software is the "supported"
price.

Of course, it's OK for you to want your product to be as cheap as possible,
but I feel the same about the product I buy.  It seems quite fair to me that
you have to pay more for what you want than I should have to pay for what I
want.