Subject: Re: Servlets in CL From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/05/17 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3167585373913842@naggum.no> * David Hanley <djh@ncgr.org> | And, while some may be willing to pay their fees, other clearly are | not. Do you see lisp dominating the PC market? Lisp hasn't taken | over, and there's a short list of potential reasons. What else do you know about that is not dominating the PC market? | I know you like them and are unable to be objective on this subject, Wrong. I'm not you, so you should be careful about extrapolating your own problems with being objective to me and others. | but despite the very high startup costs to get the environment, you | must also pay a substantial percentage of your gross profits when | you distribute software written with their product. I know their policies better than you do (partly because I argue with Franz Inc over them all the time :) and I can tell you this: You do not get a right to post hurtful lies about people just because you disagree with them. If you had to pay for the cost of recovering from people believing your lies, you would be run into the ground financially. Relax and make the effort to engage your _brain_ when you read the license. Above all, don't let emotional responses like "they're taking my food money!" overpower your reading skills and comprehension. Franz Inc is _not_ the IRS. | Also, there will be high fees if you run a server written with their | product. For the kinds of software it seems you do, these may not | be major roadblocks. For what I want to do, it's basically | unacceptable. Your behavior towards me now and towards Franz Inc is unacceptable no matter how free it is, so clearly, money is _not_ an issue for you to behave morally reprehensibly. Guess what: Other people don't change their behavior when they start to charge money for it, either. | No, eric, what's stupid is your desire to defend something which is | working for you in particular, while it may be good for you, and not | good for someone else. That's "Erik". I'm not _defending_ anything, I'm deflecting unfair criticism. These are two very different tasks, but only people who care about fairness realize the fundamental difference. I was showing you that being unilateral in such an issue is bad, but that was also before I knew what kind of person you are: You're the kind of person who thinks that when you work with or like someone, you lose your objectivity and you start to defend them as people, no matter what they _do_. In my eyes, that means you are not the kind of person _anyone_ should be working with. (Which also explains why you can't afford to pay for a license, but I digress.) | I have as much right to point out problems with pricing and | distribution fees as you have to insult people for asking reasonable | questions. But you think you have much wider rights to insult people than I ever _imagined_ I had! I don't protest your right to point out problems. I point out a problem with the way you did it: That when you do so in unilateral ways, you're setting yourself up to be shot down because you're _unfair_ in your criticism. I crack down on unfairness wherever and whenever I see it and I think I can make a difference and whoever the perpetrator is, even when it's our beloved government. However, I think it's crucial to be fair when cracking down on unfairness and so I crack down publicly when the unfairness is public and privately when it is unfairness is private. Being unfair in public because of private gripes about pricing or policy is simply _unacceptable_. (No, it doesn't matter what you think _I'm_ doing. _You_ don't get better by finding somebody else you can throw dirt at.) | > Your demands as a cheap customer is just as | > "unworkable" to a vendor as you think their pricing is to you. This | > goes for _everything_ in _any_ market. | | That's a pretty stupid statement ( again ). You're proving to me that you're seriously lacking in objectivity, which is probably why you think others have to be similarly crippled. Why are you hurting yourself by proving this? | In fact, franz is the only compiler vendor which I can think of off | hand which requires distribution fees for apps compiled with their | product. What you can think of off hand or not is really nobody's business when you are as unable to think as you have demonstrated so far. | I didn't get their stuff largely because of their pricing structure, | which is my right for anything_in_any_market. :) Of course it is. But you're doing the sour grapes thing by slamming the people whose products you didn't want to buy, and that is _not_ a right you have or can assume will be defended. If you don't want a product, actually _go_ elsewhere, don't linger and pout, OK? FWIW, I'm in constant talks with Franz Inc about ways to minimize the cost of licensing for small clients until they make real money. I have one customer who thinks just having to _discuss_ licensing terms is a serious turn-off, while money is not: They're paying _much_ more to Oracle for their database application and the ODBC drivers cost an arm and a leg, too. My biggest client is a serious Sun and Oracle outfit and the Franz Inc license costs are not even a blip in the budget. And we're already paying 50 times these costs a year to Microsoft for _their_ software and various development tools. So I wonder: Who do you people think you're kidding? Business costs are supposed to be passed on to the _custumers_, and if not, to be assumed by your shareholders or other investors when you fold or get acquired by (more) competent people. You're supposed to make money by being cleverer than the average bear, not lose it. If you can't make enough money to pay a license fee, that means not even your _investors_ believe in you! Don't take that out on Franz Inc, for crying out loud. What the software industry lacks is an easy way to go from hobbyist to real software developer in outfits that have real money to spend. As it is, we're looking at a very serious change of mindset and that will necessarily create much needless hostility, but when people who tend towards unfairness as a solution to their problems think they have a _right_ to engage in it because they disagree over pricing or licensing terms, there is no hope that they will grow a clue in the foreseeable future, either. #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.