Re: BK is *evil* corporate software [was Re: New BK License Problem?]

Henning P. Schmiedehausen
2002-10-09T23:28:44Z

Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> writes:

>On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 08:51:16PM +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>> At 12:11 AM 10/7/2002 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
>> >Hi!
>> >
>> > > We're a business. We're a business which happens to be committed to
>> > > helping the kernel team because we think that the kernel is vital to
>> > > the world at large. Helping the kernel absolutely does not translate
>> > > to helping people who happen to be our competitors. By your own
>> >
>> >Stop lying. Your job is to make lots of money and you are using Linux
>> >as cheap advertising. You are trying to make people pay *you* to do
>> >kernel development (as it stands you want $5000 for any bk-using
>> >developer inside RedHat and SuSE).
>>
>> More info on $5k assertion please?

>Let's clear this one up right away. The commercial licenses can be
>perpetual (you bought it, you own that version forever) or annual lease.
>The lease includes the right to use, support, and upgrades for as long as
>you maintain the lease. The buy includes a year of support & upgrades;
>after that you can buy support or not as you so choose. So you have the
>buy vs buy+support vs lease options.

>We vary our prices based on volume and everyone gets the same price.
>We don't publish the prices because engineers will reject the product
>based on any price more than $100/seat. Management is far more

Let's insert some fact in this discussion:

--- cut ---
Annual lease:
< 5 seats, $2490/seat/year.
5-15 seats, $1920/seat/year.

Lifetime Purchase:
< 5 seats, $5220/seat.
5-15 seats, $4230/seat.
--- cut ---

Basically you charge a small(-ish) company about $25k for any
reasonable license. This is about as much as we spent for Software in
the last seven years (we do own a few Windows and Office licenses).

bk might be interesting for larger companies with software budgets in
the six figure range and for open source. For the vast number of three
to five developers enterprises, it's simply unreasonably priced. For
25k$ I get about six man months from a really good developer to work
on <insert your SCM here>.

Regards
Henning

--
Dipl.-Inf. (Univ.) Henning P. Schmiedehausen -- Geschaeftsfuehrer
INTERMETA - Gesellschaft fuer Mehrwertdienste mbH hps@intermeta.de

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