Hamilton Group Announcement

[Sharan Kalwani]

In article <7147 at swan.ulowell.edu> page at swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) writes:
>Is the recent "hamilton group" announcement being discussed anywhere
>on USENET?  I'm interested in the opinions out there.

I seem to recall there was some (very light) discussion in comp.arch a few weeks
ago but my USENET memory is even shorter than the 6-month limit ;-).

>Executive Summary: ATT & Sun (and UNISYS and Xerox I think) are
>building "the next standard UNIX" ... a number of vendors (DEC, IBM,
>Apollo, HP, Seimens, Bull, and some others) form their OWN group
>called the Open Software Foundation to build a different UNIX (based
>on AIX so I heard), to supposedly come with less restrictions than
>ATT's version.

I attended a Seminar yesterday put on by DEC at their Application Center
for Technology (one of 17 all over NA and Europe). Jim Isaak was
there and spoke about the OSF. I shall do my best here to present some
tidbits but I hope readers out there who are more active in this field
will add to this.

The OSF has a formation committee consisting of 
	Dr. Lynn Conway (UMich)
	Prof. M. Dertouzos (MIT)
	Dean James F. Gibbons (Stanford)
	Dr. Gilles Kahn (INRA-Sofia Initopolis-France)
	Prof. Roger Needham (Cambridge)
	Dr. Raj Reddy (CMU)
	Prof. George Tubin (UCB)

A board of directors has been set up consisting of 
	John Doyle (VP - HP) as Chairman 
	Don McInnis (VP - DEC)
	Mike Guttman (Apollo)
	George Lepicard (Director - Groupe Bull)
	Berhard Wolpker (President - Nixdorf)
	Peter Schoveider (Director - IBM)
	Henry Krouse (VP - DEC) as Interim President

Okay...The objectives of OSF are to push for Open Systems (not to be
confused with COS - they are into the Networking OSI model and stuff like
that and OSF expects to work with them closely).

They will work and make available industry standards, solicit
inputs and technology, use a vendor-neutral (?) decision process,
give equal and early access to specs and development and do some
research as well. They expect to work with established Standarad 
Organizations, OSF members, Universities and Res. Orgn, and issue
Newsletters, Spec Docs, Source Code (wow!), and work on
sublicensing rights.

According to the info that was presented at the seminar, they have already
been incorporated in may '88, and have an initial funding committment
of $50-60 Million. Eventually they hope to make it self-supporting.
They will be starting off with POSIX  as Level Zero Specs
and kick off from there.

Please no flames, apologies if there are any names spelled incorrectly,
Perhaps some of the net readers will have more to add/correct (jsq ?)

>Where's RMS and GNU when you need 'em?	:-)

Yeah! If OSF wants something truly open - how about GNU?

>Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept.  page at swan.ulowell.edu  ulowell!page


-- 
sharan kalwani, vax facility, mcf, 110 east warren avenue, detroit mi 48201
usenet  : ...!{uunet!umix, pur-ee!iuvax, ucbvax!mtxinu, ihnp4!mibte}!mcf!shan
internet: shan%mcf.uucp at umix.cc.umich.edu         	shan at mcf.uucp
dec enet: decwrl::"umix.cc.umich.edu!mcf!shan"	  	fax: (313) 831-8714