At 08:46 AM 11/23/99 +0000, you wrote:
>OK, OK I have been dually chastized :-)
>
>The point that I was trying to make was: I feel that were REBOL to follow
>the pricing/Marketing example of Turbo Pascal, and price their product so
>that it is redally available to the masses combined with a top notched
>marketing plan I believe that they stand the best chance of being pull
>volted to success.
>
I mostly agree with that. However, consider that REBOL faces a different
challenge. When Turbo Pascal was released, it was the only compiler for the
PC you could buy for peanuts. (I believe it was quite some time later that
Mix offered their C compiler for even less).
Pascal had already been widely accepted on campuses as a choice programming
language because of its type strictness, but Pascal compilers for the PC
were tremendously expensive. Was there actually anything other than
Microsoft Pascal available for Intel based PCs at the time? MS Pascal was
quite a few hundred bucks.
With REBOL we are dealing with a language that has not been widely accepted
on campuses (yet?). It competes in a market in which freely available
scripting languages like Tcl/Tk, Perl and PHP have already an established
huge user base.
Therefore you cannot expect pricing to *catapult* anything through pricing.
The user base for REBOL has to be extended, i.e. people have to be exposed
to REBOL and they have to find a liking for REBOL, unlike Pascal, which was
already an accepted language on campus when TP hit the market.
In this context pricing is not a tool which will sell REBOL, it is
something that could get in the way of popularizing REBOL. Even if REBOL
had already been adopted by a large user base, you still could not use
pricing as leverage, since any, even ridiculously low price for REBOL, will
still appear "expensive", in as much as REBOL will be compared to Tcl/Tk,
Perl, PHP, which are free and the issue brought up against REBOL will not
even be pricing but rather Open Source. In other words any price will be
compared to, you get other scripting languages for free with their source
code. Compare "its free and OpenSource" to "and REBOL is as cheap as TC
was!". You don't have much of an argument there.
What this means is that REBOL Tech should be careful to put popularization
of the language first, and provide a license that ensures that they get
paid, when the language is used in a commercial setting. How much they get
paid should be driven by how much it takes to make maintaining and
extending the language a veritable business. How they should calculate
their prices is also very simple: make those people pay more, who can
better afford to and - for business reasons - need to have the assurance
that the language will continue to be maintained. Make those people pay
less or not at all, who can't as easily afford to pay for it, but are
needed as a userbase that can be hired. Pricing should not get in the way
of popularizing the language $<, nor should it get in the way of
implementing and maintaining it $>.
0.199..... cents
Elan
