Splinter Unix?

[Craig Jackson]

In article <10892 at steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>a) creation of a 4th standard (3rd if they follow posix) shows that
>   someone values the stockholders over the users.

Companies who do not value their stockholders over their customers soon have
no stockholders.  The only real reason you even want customers is so that they
will make money for the stockholders.

In any case, if this product is so abusive of the users, why should they buy
it?  Why should the companies risk their stockholder's money developing
something that nobody will want?

>b) If they wanted open they could have inputs on real UNIX, as far as I
>   can tell. AT&T reportedly offered, and I believe that Motorola and
>   someone else took them up on it.

I suspect that there is input, and there is input.  I wouldn't be surprised
if Sun had to do a significant amount of ass-licking to get their foot in
the door.  This was done several years ago, of course.

>c) when tradeoffs are to be made, are the companies with the biggest $
>   going to have the loudest voices?

Most likely, but there's always the UN as a counter-example.

>d) with AT&T trying to merge Xenix and BSD features, and promising to
>   conform to posix, and offering source, etc, why is their standard any
>   more open than UNIX? Sun has given and/or licensed a lot of their code
>   to AT&T and will then license it back like anyone else (so my Sun dealer
>   tells me).

I think that the real problems are not with the license, but with the terms
and conditions of that license, as well as the price.  The price has climbed
steadily over the years; my memories are: V7: $28k, 1980 $s, 32V: $40k 1980 $s,
SVR2: $43k 1985 $s, SVR3: $65k 1987 $s.  Note the bit of a ski-jump at the
end.  And these prices are the only ones that matter: the academic prices
are irrelevant for most customers.

>e) now that Olsen has died at AT&T, why don't the users form a public
>   corporation and buy the UNIX rights from AT&T. Since the profit would
>   come from wide acceptance I would expect more concern with the
>   portability of the prodect from a company with no hardware to sell than
>   from hardware vendors who all want an edge. I respect greed as a motive
>   for portability, when someone claims to be acting for the good of the
>   user I suspect their motives.

This assumes, of course, that AT&T will want to sell.  They might, but
the price would need to be on the order of the present discounted value
of the future revenue anticipated to come from Unix.  Since I suspect that
AT&T thinks that Unix is a pretty good product, it anticipates *lots* of
revenue from it in the future.

>f) In my opinion they're trying to kill UNIX with similar but
>   proprietary clones. Like killing flys by releasing sterile males.

May be.  Hasn't the industry been working at this since around 1980?

>-- 
>	bill davidsen		(wedu at ge-crd.arpa)
>  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
>"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me


-- 
Craig Jackson
UUCP: {harvard!axiom,linus!axiom,ll-xn}!drilex!dricej
BIX:  cjackson