Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!adiron!tro From: tro@adiron.UUCP (Tom Olin) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news Subject: Re: NeWS down-played in OW 2.0 Summary: Sun, Standards, and Stubbornness Message-ID: <455@adiron.UUCP> Date: 23 Aug 90 22:09:55 GMT References: <11722@hoptoad.uucp> <1990Aug21.154152.27532@odin.corp.sgi.com> <4806@shemesh.GBA.NYU.EDU> Organization: PAR Technology, New Hartford, NY Lines: 110 In article <4806@shemesh.GBA.NYU.EDU>, ittai@shemesh.GBA.NYU.EDU (Ittai Hershman) writes: > In article <14471@diamond.BBN.COM>, mlandau@bbn.com (Matthew Landau) writes: > > Let's be realistic for a minute: as a vendor of worktations, Sun has > > to ask itself what the customer base is demanding, and at the moment, > > the customer base is demanding a good, high-performance implementation > > of X11. Yes, *we* all know that X pales in comparison to NeWS along > > any dimension you care to compare... except for the all-important > > dimension of market popularity. > > If Sun stopped its Open Look jihad and simply adopted the Motif > look-n-feel, they would have a lot more latitude to develop new > software. Let's not have a Motif vs. Open Look flame war -- see the > latest Unix Today! editorial on the subject. I'm just pointing out > that if Sun weren't expending so many resources on fighting Motif, > they could develop better X11 and NeWS implementations and gain even > more market share. > > -Ittai I'm sure Sun appreciates the concern of both you and "UNIX Today!" for their well-being. However, whether or not Sun is doing the right thing, you, the "UNIX Today!" columnist, and many other people in the world seem to be missing a key point that has been discussed in previous issues of that same newspaper. The June 25 issue's lead article was on the June 11 Usenix conference held in Anaheim. At that conference, UNIX pioneer Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs remarked, "Standards committees are not the best way to create a standard. Standards meetings and standards themselves are horribly political things.... One thing that people forget is that many standards are made by rather small groups of people. A few good people can really save the day, and a few idiots can really make it miserable for years to come." He also touched on some of the shortcomings of some of today's standards, including POSIX and X11. The July 23 issue's lead article was on a new experimental operating system being developed at Bell Labs. In that article, Ritchie's colleague Rob Pike was quoted discussing standards: Previously, standards were decided once a technology had been out in the market for some time. Now, he said, "we're standardizing before we build systems," with potentially dangerous consequences. "Standardization now usually precedes understanding," added Pike. "For instance, people are now trying to standardize distributed systems when they [commercial implementations] don't even exist yet." Don't misunderstand me. I think standards are great, if treated properly. But I also agree with what Ritchie and Pike (and others) are saying. Standards *are* being defined prematurely in many cases. The "UNIX Today!" editorial you mention states, "... most people say Open Look is technically superior to Motif." That is generally consistent with my experience with people who have used both. I have also noticed that people who know much about both X11 and NeWS generally consider NeWS to be technically superior to X11. The editorial also states, "Users, however, have overwhelmingly decided to use Motif." Perhaps. Some may doubt that the GUI war has been won, but there is little doubt that X11, whether good or bad, is in control of the window system battlefield. All of this raises some questions: 1. Assuming that NeWS is technically superior to X11 and that OpenLook is technically superior to Motif, did/do users really *want* to choose second-best solutions? 2. Assuming that NeWS is technically superior to X11 and that OpenLook is technically superior to Motif, is it mere coincidence that NeWS and OpenLook both came from Sun, the workstation market leader, while X11 and Motif both came from consortiums led by Sun's competitors in the workstation market? 3. Assuming X11 is the window system standard for the foreseeable future, does the fact that the whole world has decided that it is the standard mean that it will be the one and only standard forever? Other than incremental enhancements (R5, R6, ...), will it never get any better than this? My own feeling is that users who have decided to specify X11/Motif as their "standard" have done so, not necessarily because they believe that those products are the best answer to their needs, but because they believe that those products will be the most widely available from the industry. And while it is certainly important to avoid investing in products or vendors that might disappear in the near future, it is also important to understand that today's standards will not last forever. No matter how good X11 is, it will someday be replaced by something better. In fact, the same thing could even happen to - gasp! - UNIX. (See, for example, the aforementioned lead story in the July 23 issue of "UNIX Today!".) One might ask, if Sun is being stubborn on Motif, why aren't they being stubborn on NeWS? Simple. NeWS cannot currently replace X11. The product (NeWS) is not as mature as X11, and the whole world has a few years worth of investment in X11. Not so with Motif. The world could still switch to OpenLook without too much pain. So who's being stubborn, Sun or OSF? Perhaps, from a business standpoint, Sun should give up and go with the flow. From a technical standpoint, however, I admire them for sticking to their guns. And, as a programmer and a user, I prefer that *any* standards contest be decided on the basis of technical merit, not popularity. Then again, maybe I'm foolish for feeling that way. Please don't consider this an invitation for a Motif/OpenLook or even an X11/NeWS flame war. Please redirect all flames to /dev/null. If you don't like what I wrote, feel free to ignore it completely. Others probably will. -- ____ ____ | __ | /||___ | ||__||//|| __|| ||___//_||| __| || //__|| \\ Tom Olin ...!uunet!adiron!tro (315) 738-0600, Ext 638 || // || \\ PAR Technology Corp, 220 Seneca Tpke, New Hartford NY 13413