Roelof, ActiveState Perl is free http://www.activestate.com/ ... they make their money selling related products and services ...
http://www.fsf.org/ .... the Free Software Foundation is all about "promoting computer users' rights to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs". They are "the primary sponsor of the GNU Project". Borland broke into a market of $500 U.S. compilers by introducing Turbo Pascal for < $50 U.S. ... Sun took over the computing world by giving away Java and the JVM for FREE. The Internet has led us to expect everything for free. Early browsers during the browser wars were and still are free. Of course, there are exceptions: one bought Opera for quite some time (it was worth buying) but it too is now free AFAIK: http://www.opera.com/ . Google, while not software, is free. So is gmail with over 2GB of storage for on-line e-mail (assuming someone sends you an invitation for a Google g-mail account). Google makes its $$$$'s from advertising. Soon, a major music organization will provide song downloads for free to those willing to view a commercial first. Acrobat Reader is free ... that was the only way Adobe could get people to purchase software to produce .pdf files for distribution. I doubt there is any need to justify the "free" in J ... ... nevertheless, you can show off the "Representative Users" at http://www.jsoftware.com/ ... ... you can mention the Turing and IBM Fellow status of Ken and his passion for teaching ... the jsoftware consulting services http://www.jsoftware.com/consulting.htm ... and the source scenarios (http://www.jsoftware.com/source.htm) ... if your department of computing science is uncomfortable with a fine free product, they can always buy the $400 000 license ... I have no doubt that Eric, Roger, et al would be more than happy to comfort your department by depositing their cheque. regards ... gerry P.S.: to Eric, Roger, et al .... thank you for making J free ... you are more appreciated than you may realize. g. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
