Splinter Unix?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <21387 at labrea.STANFORD.EDU> karish at denali.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes:
>It must also grate to have AT&T try to dictate the exact form
>of the distributed product, with all the conditions in the SysV.3
>licensing agreement.

Oh, BS.  I checked the licensing and sublicensing agreements and had
no qualms about our signing them, nor have several genuine vendors.
You're probably referring to the clause that says that the software
provided under the source code provisions (in effect, AT&T's UNIX
trademark) will not be applied to a product that does not meet their
published specifications.  That seems eminently reasonable to me;
as a CUSTOMER, I want to know that what I'm getting will meet my
needs.  Vendors who wanted to market any old thing regardless of its
properties could still do so under the previous sublicensing
agreement (which we also signed).

>Is there any indication that OSF intends to write a complete,
>incompatible implementation?

Is there any doubt that that is what will happen?  Take STREAMS,
including RFS, for example.  It is rather hard to implement this
extremely important post-SVR2 feature simply from the non-proprietary
specifications (at least from those of which I am aware) without
introducing SOME degree of incompatibility with AT&T-based
implementations.

>... others say that the way they plan to do it will give Sun an
>unfair marketing advantage (several months) over their competitors
>(and uneasy bedfellows).

Seems to me the noisy vendors had plenty of time to work out a
similar deal with AT&T.  Is it unfair for a company that sees a
need and works to meet it to gain a competitive advantage thereby?
I think not.  (By the way, I don't know that they really will.)
Or is "fair" supposed to mean that companies who haven't contributed
to the development of UNIX are supposed to parasitically reap rewards
from it?  They should count themselves lucky that people even buy
their systems after they spent years attempting to lock customers
into their proprietary product lines.  I agree fully with the fellow
who sees the AIX ploy as an attempt to destroy UNIX as an open system.
Let's hope they get what they deserve, which is loss of sales to other
vendors who offer "common UNIX" with value added.