Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!benoni
From: benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Splinter Unix?
Message-ID: <1936@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Date: 19 May 88 04:26:28 GMT
References: <556@n8emr.UUCP>
Organization: Boeing Aerospace Corp., Seattle WA
Lines: 32

in article <556@n8emr.UUCP>, lwv@n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) says:
> 	IBM, DEC, Apollo, and Hewlett-Packard are set to announce 
>       the formation of a 
> 	consortium called the Open Software Foundation to develop an alternate
My feeling is that very little that IBM, DEC and Apollo is open.  I am not
the only one I'm sure that ascribes ulterior motives to DEC and IBM ...
(deliberately causing a split and confusion so they can sell more VMS, MVS,
etc boxes).  The announcement is just that an announcement.  We will have to
wait 18 months (by which time Sys V Rel 4.0 will have been out) for this
vaporware.  And it's not clear it will be worth all that much. 

The Wall Street Journal had some interesting comments by Bill Gates :"Look
at it this way, Sun is so golden that it forced all these industry giants
to band together against it."

If Gates is right then the Open Software Consortium doesn't help DEC, IBM,
Apollo and HP in the least bit. 1)The Consortium's standard is undefined
as of the moment, 2) 18 months or more will pass 3) they all are on different
architectures 4) they all are competitors and 5) people are buying Suns quite
simply because the machines are a better quality product.  Sun has managed
to do things that IBM/DEC/Apollo seems utterly incapable of ... 

Having experienced Apollo's version of "Unix", I'll stick with AT&T... 
we don't need another version of Unix especially from three vendors
that had to be dragged into the Unix marketplace ... now there spending
their time trying  to convince people how well they understand Unix marketplace.


....(Mr. Olsen of DEC showed his true feeling about Unix recently with 
his "snake oil salesmen" statement.)
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Naturally My Opinions Are My Own and NOT those of the Boeing Company.