Xref: utzoo comp.windows.news:1783 comp.windows.x:16277 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!emory!mephisto!bbn!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau From: mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) Newsgroups: comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Is SUN a "PURE PLAYER" in window systems - SunView or OpenWindows??? Message-ID: <13324@granite.BBN.COM> Date: 2 Jan 90 19:15:16 GMT References: <8912302010.AA11723@super.super.org> <13323@diamond.BBN.COM> Sender: news@bbn.com Lines: 39 bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) writes: >(Bob starts the new year by diving into a flamefest :-) (Bob starts the new year by saying some remarkably reasonable things :-) > The place where Sun botched it was in not doing a "sample > implementation" of NeWS and making it publicly available >Right! And it's surprising that their marketeers didn't see that. >Enough people at the time were offering such suggestions as free >advice, one wonders why Sun didn't listen. It's too late now. Maybe not. I recently learned first-hand the degree to which customer opinion really can make a difference in Sun corporate policy. It's a little-known fact that until quite recently (the last couple of weeks), Sun had OpenWindows on a tight allocation policy, which is why people who'd ordered it months ago were still waiting for their tapes. At the recent Sun User Group conference, several of us got wind of this fact, and we were rather ... ahem ... "outspoken" ... in our opinion that this was a critical tactical mistake, and tantamount to suicide for both NeWS and Open Look. Basically, lots of people complained real loudly about this brain-dead policy (I spent about 45 minutes talking to Carl Wolf in the gripe booth, and another 30 talking to Scott McNealy; other people raised the issue in the public question-and-answer sessions and the executive roundtable.) The result was that, according to a piece of mail I got from a friend inside Sun, OpenWindows has been taken off allocation and will ship to all customers who order it. What's the point? The point is that if enough people make enough noise, things can change. Now ask yourself what might happen if Sun were to donate the source to X11/NeWS to the MIT X Consortium, just for the sake of promoting it as a superior technology that wasn't under Sun's complete control anymore... After all, Sun's done something similar with control of the Sparc processor architecture... And AT&T is doing something vaguely similar with SvR4... So ask yourself what might happen if X11R5 (or X12 or something) were based on the merged NeWS/X server... Then ask yourself how we might make this happen...