Re: It costs how much?!!?!

[Kenneth Mankoff <mankoff(at)lasp.colorado.edu>]

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, David Fanning wrote:
>I think the impression most people have is that if someone is giving
>something away, it's not worth much. I do think it makes sense though to
>charge a reasonable price for students. (I'm thinking something in the
>range of $200, which seems to be the going academic pricing if people
>can get it together enough to order a site license. That seems fair to
>me, given what you can do with IDL.)

i think the linux/unix open source school would very much disagree with
"free is not worth much".  Free can be better.

And if it were open source, us linux-using students who like to hack
things apart and put them together in our spare time would turn out some
mean routines to improve the product.  This theoretical free open-source
student IDL (wow, aren't i in a daydream) would probably have openGL, GUI
builders, ports to Palm Vx OS, entire libraries of extensions, etc., all
within a few months..