[MUD-Dev] Commercial value of RP

[JC Lawrence]

On Sun, 11 Jan 1998 20:19:52 PST8PDT 
Raph & Kristen Koster<koster at eden.com> wrote:

>> On Fri, 9 Jan 1998 07:29:54 PST8PDT Koster,
>> Raph<rkoster at origin.ea.com> wrote:

>>> More business realities: there's a Linux version. It's only
>>> available in-house. It's faster than the Win95 version too. :P
...

>>  Was any consideration given to making them freely available on the
>> net as unsupported-use-at-your-own-risk?

> Yes, but this is also something that a company can be reluctant to
> do for various reasons. 

Understood.  I've been at both ends of this fight before.

> You do still get the folks who want some
> degree of support; you also get some degree of PR hit for not
> supporting it; plus you HAVE to support it to some extent in UO's
> case since you have to make sure that patching and the like occur
> seamlessly regardless of client platform.  Let's not forget that a
> full UO distrib is pretty large. :)

I've seen attempted solutions both of which an alleviate some of these
troubles:

  -- An equivalent to Employee Written Software (an IBM term and
structure).  EWS is exactly what it sounds like -- written by
employees on their own time (occassionally with official blessing),
and then relases as-is where-is.  Essentially EWS is unsupported other
than to whatever extent the "employee" wishes to extend himself, but
is officially distributed by the parent company (cf IBM Watson).  In
IBM's case the main restrictions on something becoming EWS are
concerns on competition and similar impacts on other for-fee products.

  -- As released by an employee with the blessing of the parent
company.  This one can be tricker.  It almost always comes down to a
knowing complicity between the "employee" and the company, but it
allows the company to offer a service and then law all the blame and
responsibility for the service on the hapless employee. 


--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
                                           Internet: coder at ibm.net
----------(*)                        Internet: jc.lawrence at sun.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...