Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!mtunx!rutgers!njin!princeton!udel!gatech!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!cfa!ward
From: ward@cfa.harvard.EDU (Steve Ward)
Newsgroups: comp.std.misc
Subject: Re: Open Software Foundation
Summary: Ultrix is AT&T Unix-based
Message-ID: <1040@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>
Date: 8 Jun 88 22:06:11 GMT
References: <5694@potomac.ads.com> <782@dlhpedg.co.uk>
Organization: Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr. for Astrophysics
Lines: 32

In article <782@dlhpedg.co.uk>, cl@datlog.co.uk (Charles Lambert) writes:
> From the UK industry newspaper "Computer Weekly", June 2nd 1988, quoted
> without permission....
> 
> 
> 		DEC SEES NEW UNIX VERSION BY AUTUMN
> 		       by Terry Ernest-Jones
> 
>     "A version of UNIX suuporting the first set of Open Software
>      Foundation standards has been promised by DEC for this autumn,
>      as AT&T pours scorn on its rival's prospects.
> 
>     "It is ironic that DEC should be the first foundation member to
>      declare support of its standards,  since DEC's Ultrix ... was
>      rejected by other members as the basis for the operating system.
>      Instead a future version of IBM's AIX was chosen.
> 

If this is a quote from an AT&T source it is bizarre because DEC Ultrix
is based on AT&T licensed Unix code (principally BSD 4.x) and therefore
could not be used for an OSF Unix clone product since the whole point is
to write a suitable Unix clone from scratch that has not one line of
AT&T code and therefore requires no AT&T licensing.  The IBM product is
a clone, and fills the bill, at least as an OSF starting point.  The
only other non-AT&T choice was Apollo Aegis, I believe.  Even Apollo
has abandoned Aegis (now using a Sys V Unix I believe) as their
Unix-like product. (Apollo may or may not be calling the product Aegis
but they have moved away from their own clone code to AT&T code and
will presumably move to the OSF clone code when it is ready).

At any rate, the only viable non-AT&T (unix clone) code was the IBM AIX
stuff.