Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!killer!tness7!tness1!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.UUCP (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.std.misc
Subject: Re: Open Software Foundation...
Message-ID: <2105@sugar.UUCP>
Date: 12 Jun 88 02:24:23 GMT
References: <5745@potomac.ads.com>
Organization: Sugar Land UNIX - Houston, TX
Lines: 26


I agree that the OSF will have a negative effect on Unix's acceptance by 
creating two Unixes when we were about to get down to having almost only one 
and by the expected 18 month lead time for the standards to show up.  I think 
if they were serious, they would have said something like "The current working
standard is System V Release 2" along with the announcment.  Perhaps they 
still will.  I would counsel any company seriously committed to Unix to be
very careful before getting into bed with IBM and DEC on this issue.

By the number of people they're hiring to work on this standard (hundreds), 
it's almost guaranteed to be late and of poor quality.  (ref. Brooks, 
Frederick,  _The Mythical Man Month_)

As far as everyone getting a "say" in new Unix standards, I think the same
thing is true.  I'd rather put it in the hands of some benign dictators.
We've seen this design-by-committee stuff fail too many times.  Indeed, many 
attribute a lot of Unix's success to the fact that it was originally designed 
and built by a small group of very talented designers without much pressure 
to ship a product.  When there are a lot of designers, for some reason, the 
results seem to always lack consistency and there is too much of a tendency to
make deals, like "I'll vote for your new pet tumor if you'll vote for my new 
festering pustule."  As for who the dictators would be, how about the creators 
of it, Ritchie, Kernighan, et al, with a few specific things in their charter 
like that it support multiprocessing, realtime and transaction processing?
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