UNIX standard

[Charles Hedrick]

From: hedrick at athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)

uunet!wlbr.eaton.com!etn-rad!jru (John Unekis) says some Sun sales
types claimed that because of the ABI (binary standard), if your
machine isn't based on SPARC (the Sun RISC chip), it wouldn't *really*
be Unix compatible.  He asks whether this is just hype.

This issue has been discussed in the trade press a lot.  A number of
vendors are quite upset at the Sun/ATT cooperative deal for precisely
this reason.  They want Unix to continue to be open.  ATT has been
reassuring people that Unix will indeed continue to be open.  ATT is
helping create binary standards for SPARC and 386.  Other vendors with
serious interest in Unix are sponsoring similar standards for their
chips, e.g. Motorola for the 680x0.

The other major issue is whether other vendors will get advance copies
of new releases soon enough that they can come out with their own
ports, and not have Sun and ATT always be a year ahead of them.  ATT is
now saying that they will continue to do this, and that their own field
test and other overheads are long enough that other vendors should be
able to come out with releases at roughly the same time as the ones
that ATT produces.

It will be interesting to see how things develop in this area.  I'm
sure both ATT and Sun have toyed from time to time with the idea of
closing Unix (whatever that means), but I don't see any way that that
could really happen.

[ Please pardon the paragraphing, Charles:  I couldn't read it as
one big block of text.  -mod ]

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 35