Xref: utzoo comp.sys.amiga:73119 alt.religion.computers:2117 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!uwm.edu!wuarchive!rex!ames!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,alt.religion.computers Subject: Re: A3000UX competition Keywords: think c.s.a.advocacy! Message-ID: <1990Dec2.153612.28555@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 2 Dec 90 15:36:12 GMT References: <86470@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <12003@hubcap.clemson.edu> <36449@cup.portal.com> Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 36 1) We've seen a lot of SYSV4 versus BSD bashing here. Can anybody actually say with some authority what you give away in going from BSD to SYSV4, rather than just the known-to-be-false statement that SYSV4 is a superset of BSD? What will be the effect at the user/developer interface level? 2) _The_ thing that made BSD so much better than its AT&T parent that AT&T finally had to bow to the inevitable (as the workstation market "all" went BSD) and mutate SYSV4 into a BSD clone to be marketable, was the ready availability of _almost free_, _full_ source code licences to the user/programmer community, so that the tremendous resource of free user community programming effort could be brought to bear on improving BSD through several extremely impressive upgrades while AT&T fell further and further behind. Now that AT&T has wrested control of the future of Unix back from the user community, are we going to see the same dreary game of home-mortgage-sized source licence fees and vendor-only code improvements retarding the future of Unix, or has the lesson of open software systems finally been learned, so that cost-of-media source code licenses and ready adoption/sharing of user written OS improvements will keep the future of Unix bright? 3) Tripos would have been out of AmigaDOS two years ago if the user community had been allowed to participate in the process. Has Commodore learned the BSD lesson yet? 4) BSD's other great advantage was _hundreds_ of utilities, compilers, whatnot bundled with the (cheap, cheap, cheap) OS. Are we getting the "real" Unix with AmigaUX, or just a stripped down file server and a chance to bleed to death $100 at a time buying the utilities that make everyday BSD use the most productive software development environment in existance? Kent, the man from xanth.