Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!denali!karish From: karish@denali.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Splinter Unix? Keywords: unix, aix, system v, posix Message-ID: <21419@labrea.STANFORD.EDU> Date: 19 May 88 15:49:37 GMT References: <556@n8emr.UUCP> <7922@brl-smoke.ARPA> <21387@labrea.STANFORD.EDU> <7932@brl-smoke.ARPA> Sender: news@labrea.STANFORD.EDU Reply-To: karish@denali.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) Organization: Mindcraft, Inc. Lines: 80 In article <7932@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) ) writes: >In article <21387@labrea.STANFORD.EDU> karish@denali.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes: >>Is there any indication that OSF intends to write a complete, >>incompatible implementation? > >Is there any doubt that that is what will happen? Take STREAMS, >including RFS, for example. It is rather hard to implement this >extremely important post-SVR2 feature simply from the non-proprietary >specifications (at least from those of which I am aware) without >introducing SOME degree of incompatibility with AT&T-based >implementations. Are we still talking about an open standard? >>... others say that the way they plan to do it will give Sun an >>unfair marketing advantage (several months) over their competitors >>(and uneasy bedfellows). > >Seems to me the noisy vendors had plenty of time to work out a >similar deal with AT&T. Is it unfair for a company that sees a >need and works to meet it to gain a competitive advantage thereby? No. I'm sure that the Sun/AT&T product will be a good one, and they deserve to profit from their efforts. Their competitors, however, can't afford to base their business strategies on what Sun might or might not deliver to them. Perhaps my use of the word `unfair' was misunderstood; I meant it to apply to the metaphorical game I'd just described. I think it's tragic that it's impossible to make real improvements to Unix without making big hunks of it proprietary, but that's the way our economic system works. >I think not. (By the way, I don't know that they really will.) If they don't, they won't be doing their jobs, and their stockholders should hold them to account. >Or is "fair" supposed to mean that companies who haven't contributed >to the development of UNIX are supposed to parasitically reap rewards >from it? They should count themselves lucky that people even buy >their systems after they spent years attempting to lock customers >into their proprietary product lines. IBM and DEC are probably EACH now putting more resources into Un*x development than is the Sun/AT&T combine. AT&T hasn't sold cheap UNIX licenses for altruistic reasons; they get a lot of free engineering done in universities, by customers who could never have afforded full-price software. The development of UNIX as an open system took place during a period when AT&T was prohibited by law from promoting it as a proprietary product. I appreciate the engineering aesthetics and the ethics of the people who created UNIX, and I hope to see those traditions carried on. Those are the values of the engineers, however, not of the corporations. >I agree fully with the fellow >who sees the AIX ploy as an attempt to destroy UNIX as an open system. >Let's hope they get what they deserve, which is loss of sales to other >vendors who offer "common UNIX" with value added. What the heck is "common UNIX"? Note that the phrase contains a trademark owned by AT&T. Getting back to my earlier point, any element of an open standard must be reproducible from publicly available, written specifications. It's possible to do NFS that way. It's possible to do PostScript that way. If AT&T wants to keep streams as a proprietary extension, fine. The customers will decide whether it's a critical selling point. You may wish to consider the added value in the AIX product before you assume that it will be inferior, either technically or in the marketplace. As has been the case with AT&T's UNIX, the software product may have a bigger impact than will the machines it's meant to run on. (I speak only for myself.) Chuck Karish ARPA: karish@denali.stanford.edu BITNET: karish%denali@forsythe.stanford.edu UUCP: {decvax,hplabs!hpda}!mindcrf!karish USPS: 1825 California St. #5 Mountain View, CA 94041