Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Tim Mooney) · Wed, 3 Jun 1998 13:00:14 -0500

re...

> We at MSU are planning on using EPICS and are trying to buy VxWorks from
> WRS.  A few EPICS consortium members have thrown around numbers like $8K
> with educational discount for a single seat license. However, our WRS rep
> says we don't qualify for the educational discount because we are not
> actually TEACHING a class using VxWorks.  Our price will be $16.5K for a
> single seat license.
> 
> Has anyone recently purchased VxWorks for less than the $16.5K price?  Any
> info is appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Lynn Foth
> [email protected]

Not recently, but we have purchased 13 single-seat licenses for less than $16k.
The first ten cost $2300 each (at that time, this was 1/10 the cost of the regular
developer's license).  I think we bought the last three for $2700 in 1994.  I think
similar licenses for Tornado would cost $8k without the tools (e.g. WindView, Stethescope).
(Note that these licenses are in *addition* to APS' developer's license, which is not a
single-seat license.)

The deal requires us to distribute and provide all technical support for the software.
Documentation is not included, and the organizations to which we resell licenses really
are very small projects with one or two developers who may not even be doing any VxWorks
development, but who nevertheless need VxWorks header files and libraries to compile EPICS
code developed elsewhere.  On the whole, the organizations who buy these licenses look
to WRS more like the customers of a VxWorks developer than like a VxWorks developer.

If I were WRS, my first inclination would be to regard an organization as large as NSCL
as a likely candidate for a normal developer's license, unless some good case were made
that it's not NSCL asking for the license, but rather some small project associated with
NSCL.

Tim Mooney ([email protected]) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls & Data Acquisition Group
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System