Splinter Unix?

[Roger B.A. Klorese]

In article <10892 at steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>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.

"Inputs" is not the only issue.  Frozen code deliverable under terms that would
not give AT&T and/or Sun a time-to-market advantage, and not optimized for
any pre-selected and proprietary hardware base, is another, at least as
important, issue.

>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).

...with them keeping time-to-market advantage.  Besides, OSF's standard
is more open because it's not cooked up in a closed-door lab and handed
to licensees after the fact.

>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.

Because AT&T doesn't want to sell those rights to anyone, but rather, 
protect its investment in offering the only platforms which will be UNIX 
on day one of release, namely their own products and those developed by 
their soon-to-be-subsidiary, Sun Microsystems.

-- 
Roger B.A. Klorese                           MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.
{ames,decwrl,prls,pyramid}!mips!rogerk  25 Burlington Mall Rd, Suite 300
rogerk at mips.COM                                     Burlington, MA 01803
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