Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!munnari.oz.au!goanna!ok
From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Un*X cost
Message-ID: <4187@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 2 Nov 90 08:06:19 GMT
References: <2176@lupine.NCD.COM> <42310@mips.mips.COM> <0093F120.388EDA40@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 38

In article <0093F120.388EDA40@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>, sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes:
> In article <3686@skye.ed.ac.uk>, richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) writes:

> >With luck, within a year or so, they may be two industrial-strength
> >free Unixes available - GNU, from the Free Software Foundation, and
> >4.4-detox (ie BSD "detoxified" - with the AT&T code removed).

> But who will provide support for GNU & the 4.4? Will there be independent
> consulting firms started up which charge $$$$/hour for support of these OSes?
> I know it will make the hackers happy, but for those poor folks (such as
> myself) who prefer not to go recompile the OS, it isn't going to make much
> difference....they'll still end up purchasing products with a "supported"
> UNIX bundled in. 

There already _are_ support companies that support GNU products; quite a
few, in fact.  I don't see any reason to expect the level of support
available for 4.4-detox or GNU to be inferior in practical terms to the
level of support from some manufacturers.  (Never mind the new features,
I just want the _old_ ones to work.)  It's also worth noting that people
supporting 4.4-detox have an incentive to make it work on the machine you
already have, instead of encouraging you to upgrade your hardware.

Is there an architectural issue here?  There's certainly an issue concerning
the hardware industry.  I remember what O/S support was like for a B6700;
you sent in your form describing your problem (and as you had MCP and
compiler sources 4 times out of 5 you sent in a patch), and about 6 months
later there was a new release with a list of all the mistakes that had been
fixed and a list of the mistakes that were still open, and yours was in
there somewhere.  This doesn't seem to happen with UNIX.  _Some_ companies
fix things fairly promptly and worry a lot about quality control, but _some_
that I've come across basically wait for the next release from AT&T.  I've
reported mistakes in utilities that were still there years later.  Is there
any reason why a hardware vendor couldn't ship *and support* 4.4-detox?
(Market forces are a different question.)

-- 
The problem about real life is that moving one's knight to QB3
may always be replied to with a lob across the net.  --Alasdair Macintyre.