Tom Masterson staggered into view and mumbled: > Define reasonable price. If it costs you $3,600 in material and labor to > produce something what is a reasonable selling price. Certainly not > $2,000.00 no company would stay in business selling for less than the cost > of production and support. I really strongly believe that the production costs for most if not all the products made for disabled people CAN'T possibly be THAT HIGH. There is really NO reason that an 80 cell braille display should cost roughly as much as a car, which, I might add, has a lot more sophisticated and precision machinery in it than does a braille display, or that a computer with a little bit of software on it for a blind person should cost about 8 times as much as the computer you buy at the local computer store with EXACTLY the same parts and an operating system already installed on it that costs about 1/5 the price of the software a blind person needs to make it talk. May I point out that Windows XP is just under $200, and it has been said that Microsoft would still make a profit irom it if it was only sold for $85. Similar numbers are a matter of public record, as this came out during the antitrust lawsuit of Microsoft. The operating system is only just under $200, but they were sued for price fixing among other things. Compare that to JFW at $995. If Windows is sold for $200 and the Department of Justice accuses Microsoft of exercising monopoly power to fix the price of the OS, then obviously the $995 price for JFW is WAY too high when you consider that the program is really not much more than a highly configurable highly sophisticated driver that uses a lot of DONATED and otherwise FREE technology provided by Microsoft via API's and by other companies. Note that this subject is definitely not about Linux in general, nor is it about Linux accessibility, so this will be my LAST message posted to the list. But PLEASE feel free to email me privately regarding this topic, and I may in the future set up a mailing list of my own specifically for this topic, as I believe very strongly that it DOES need to be addressed on a much broader scale. Lorenzo Prince happy Red Hat 9 user ;) -- Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. (By komarimf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Mark Komarinski) _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list