Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!oberon!cit-vax!elroy!ames!killer!chasm From: chasm@killer.UUCP (Charles Marslett) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Splinter Unix? Summary: Who made that offer??? Keywords: unix, aix, system v, posix Message-ID: <4137@killer.UUCP> Date: 21 May 88 04:12:13 GMT References: <556@n8emr.UUCP> <7922@brl-smoke.ARPA> <21387@labrea.STANFORD.EDU> <7932@brl-smoke.ARPA> Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas Lines: 92 In article <7932@brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP 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. So we blame IBM for acting legally? Or we tell them they have to copy someone else's code, in the distant future, and pay for it to boot? The statements are true, or at least I see no reason to doubt them, but life is hard. We live it the real world and I see no reason for IBM to sacrifice its market share, and improvements it may see fit to make to UNIX (S5R2) just so we can have one true Unix. Why not let IBM develop S5R4, and throw out "STREAMS" . . . or better yet, let Apollo and IBM in on the design stage. > >... 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? > I think not. As a matter of fact it is not unreasonable (I don't like the word "unfair") for a company that sees a market need to benifit from satisfying it. And as a matter of fact it appears that is exactly what IBM, et al., are doing -- Sun and AT&T are going off and designing their own neato Unix, offering the world the option of taking a free ride a year or so later (more or less) and the rest of the world declined. They will serve their own markets, produce (more or less) ANSI/IEEE compatible Unix-like products and we'll see an interesting variety of operating systems. Each granting its own vendor some competitive advantage. Is this for the best? We certainly will not see an MSDOS or OS/2 kind of portability of software, but we may see more rapid improvement of the tools of our trade. Ask me next year. And yes, they had plenty of time to make the same deal -- and they were not able (or willing) to. I am not privy to what Sun and AT&T negotiated, but that deal is EXCLUSIVE so if IBM had made the deal SUN WOULD BE JUST AS OUT IN THE COLD AS THE 7 GIANTS ARE. So AT&T is the culprit if there is one. AT&T created this state of affairs (incompetently or deliberately, it doesn't really matter). > 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? ... I find it a bit irritating that anyone would think my buying a product and then trying to use it is "parasitic" in any sense. Or does this imply Apollo and IBM are not legally licensing Unix? > They should count themselves lucky that people even buy > their systems after they spent years attempting to lock customers > into their proprietary product lines. I agree fully with the fellow > who sees the AIX ploy as an attempt to destroy UNIX as an open system. And the various enhancements Sun has provided are not proprietary? None have been posted to the net, none are submitted to Stallman for inclusion in GNU and (to the best of my knowledge) Sun would sue me if I ported them over to my Atari (-:). As far as the idea of open systems go, I find System V no more an open system than AIX (or MSDOS or OS/360 for that matter) -- it is totally defined and controlled by AT&T, we may propose changes or oppose changes, but the owner, author, and final authority is one company: AT&T. POSIX and perhaps GNU are open systems, and as I understand it IBM is committed to implementing POSIX (AT&T is not). > Let's hope they get what they deserve, which is loss of sales to other > vendors who offer "common UNIX" with value added. And again, is "common UNIX" defined? Is it what Sun and AT&T call it? And what value can you add, when you have to play catch up with a secretly developed standard. (In case you haven't got the point, I like publicly established standards like POSIX much better than private ones, and I would be even more vitrolic about a standard developed in secret by one of my competitors -- and a vendor with whom I am now finding myself in competition). Perhaps this is more the reverse, we have two companies trying to establish a proprietary operating system and deny the fact by calling it "common UNIX". Charles Marslett chasm@killer.UUCP STB Systems, Inc. [#include standard_disclaimer.h]