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From: jg@crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: A tirade about inefficient software & systems
Message-ID: <1990Nov7.140940.28890@crl.dec.com>
Date: 7 Nov 90 14:09:40 GMT
References: <9011062334.AA16216@islanders.>
Sender: news@crl.dec.com (USENET News System)
Reply-To: jg@crl.dec.com (Jim Gettys)
Organization: DEC Cambridge Research Lab
Lines: 109

In article <9011062334.AA16216@islanders.>, fgreco@dprg-330.GOVt.shearson.COM (Frank Greco) writes:
> > 
> > For starters, I agree with you that the means by which X has been made
> > a standard is the most undesirable way to do it, but it is the only
> > way that seems to work.
> 
> 	The market has always decided *real* standards.  Has and always will.
> 
> 	The way that X (and OSF/Motif, and the X toolkit in general) was 
> 	foisted upon the computing community by DEC/IBM/HP pounding their
> 	collective chests and declaring it a standard, insulting
> 	everyone's intelligence by stating that they've always been behind
> 	Unix and open systems, is certainly not a desirable way of 
> 	selecting an technology that companies use to conduct business 
> 	and universities use to help with their research.

Nothing like rewritten history, particularly from people who weren't involved....
Our arms got twisted (but not particularly by my own company in fact; at the
time Unix was a backwater, and VMS didn't know or care about X); in fact, my 
shoulder is still sorest from a particular University professor whose initials
are AvD and likes to sell books :-). 

X11 design started well BEFORE Digital decided to adopt it for VMS, 
for example (not to mention the history well before X11...).  The
design was published before implementation began, with feedback from all over,
with alpha and beta test code being available to everyone simultaneously; this 
led to implementations for many machines (including Sun, Apollo, HP, DEC,
and IBM) being available even at the first release of X11.  
Independent of Digital's history on "open systems" (ah yes, the
year's, or maybe the decade's buzz words), which is probably better than
most, and poorer than some, I dunno how to do things more openly
than that.  We were openly willing to fall flat on our faces, too, openly in 
public, if we failed to deliver.  If you don't like X's design, where were you 
during the public design and alphaa and beta testing? Lots of things got 
changed/fixed/improved from comments we recieved.

Is "open systems" defined to be only software designed, developed, licensed, and 
controlled by AT+T and/or Sun Microsystems?  I somehow think not...

> 
> > X was made a standard because there came a
> > need for some software that had capabilities much of which X
> > satisfied, because many programmers started using it, and because
> > industry momentum toward "open systems" pushed the "big players" into
> > needing a platform on which to build the UNIX GUI's.
> 

> 
> 	However, I believe that X was *really* made a de facto standard primarily 
> 	because DEC (and IBM to some degree) did not want NeWS to become
> 	another NFS.  Despite the low licensing fee of NFS, both DEC and IBM
> 	had to swallow a lot of humble pie when they had to license Sun's
> 	technology; big corporations do not like to do this.  Its bad PR
> 	when you license a competitors technology.  Hence the funding to
> 	MIT by DEC.  (Note that IBM just happens to be funding a spin-off
> 	to commercialize the Andrew File System, and another to commercialize
> 	Xerox OOP/Database/GUI technology with Metaphor...IBM doesn't 
> 	really want Sun *or* DEC stuff!)
>

As opposed to developing the technology in the open, freely available to all, 
with input from people all over?  Please go read the acknowlegements in the X 
distribution; in particular in the X Window System book.  Significant
contributors to X include folk like Dave Rosenthal of Sun (also known as one of 
the NeWS folks), who we interacted with since the days when both he and
James Gosling were still at CMU, and many many many others.  You belittle the 
contributions of all of those people and their companies with such (incorrect) 
claims.  X has been a community effort, from very early on.

You also seem to take as a given that NeWS is "better" than X; well some of
us certainly don't agree (just ask some ECAD folks, to mention one class of
application writer), and have serious reservations about some fundamental
aspects of NeWS design; it is different than X, with different beliefs about what
is important.  If that is your cup of tea, fine with me.

The funding of MIT by DEC (and IBM) as part of Athena predates X's existance (or
my working for Digital, and going to MIT on Athena) by a year to 1983.  From 
day one, Athena used Unix; ownership of any developments belonged to MIT, with 
non-exclusive licenses to DEC and IBM.  This arrangement is somewhat different
that the ITC at CMU (where the Andrew file system comes from), where ownership
resides in IBM, with a license to CMU (as I understand the situation).  If you
like, you can think of it of MIT getting a better deal.  

In any case, it was MIT's decision to make X freely available; 
you could argue, if you like conspiracy theory though, that X11 
would never have been developed if DEC hadn't been willing to
do much of the initial development of X11, which was given to MIT under
the same terms as previous versions of X.  Hard to tell whether X11 would have
been done under other circumstances.  I think we would have tried to find people
to help us (X11 was too much work for us to do at MIT, and some companies were 
already trying to make X10 a standard, believe it or not; we did everything we
could to prevent that! and that is where the urgency to get X11 out came from),
but the issue did not come up since the right people were available at the right
time.  I won't claim total altruism for my company; there were (and are) good
business reasons for establishing standards, but it wasn't specifically to 
"get Sun".  I don't expect complete altruism out of Sun, either; I expect them
to further their buisness interests.

Boy, this is much longer than I ever intended.  I guess I dislike amateur 
historians.  Maybe I'll have to write another book sometime on the history of X; 
(Cliff Stoll was beating me up the other day) but the scars of the last book 
have not yet faded...  But it would be a much more fun book to write; I could try
to find out what happened at all the other companies who decided to use X;
that would be facinating.

		Jim Gettys
		Digital Equipment Corporation (formerly of MIT Project Athena)
		Cambridge Research Laboratory
		Cambridge, Massachusetts