Splinter Unix?

[Charles Marslett]

In article <7932 at brl-smoke.ARPA>, gwyn at brl-smoke.UUCP writes:
> In article <21387 at labrea.STANFORD.EDU> karish at denali.stanford.edu (Chuck Karish) writes:
> >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.

So we blame IBM for acting legally?  Or we tell them they have to
copy someone else's code, in the distant future, and pay for it to
boot?  The statements are true, or at least I see no reason to doubt
them, but life is hard.  We live it the real world and I see no reason
for IBM to sacrifice its market share, and improvements it may see fit
to make to UNIX (S5R2) just so we can have one true Unix.  Why not let
IBM develop S5R4, and throw out "STREAMS" . . . or better yet, let Apollo
and IBM in on the design stage.

> >... 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.

As a matter of fact it is not unreasonable (I don't like the word "unfair")
for a company that sees a market need to benifit from satisfying it.  And
as a matter of fact it appears that is exactly what IBM, et al., are doing --
Sun and AT&T are going off and designing their own neato Unix, offering the
world the option of taking a free ride a year or so later (more or less) and
the rest of the world declined.  They will serve their own markets, produce
(more or less) ANSI/IEEE compatible Unix-like products and we'll see an
interesting variety of operating systems.  Each granting its own vendor
some competitive advantage.

Is this for the best?  We certainly will not see an MSDOS or OS/2 kind
of portability of software, but we may see more rapid improvement of the
tools of our trade.  Ask me next year.


And yes, they had plenty of time to make the same deal -- and they were
not able (or willing) to.  I am not privy to what Sun and AT&T negotiated,
but that deal is EXCLUSIVE so if IBM had made the deal SUN WOULD BE JUST
AS OUT IN THE COLD AS THE 7 GIANTS ARE.  So AT&T is the culprit if there
is one.  AT&T created this state of affairs (incompetently or deliberately,
it doesn't really matter).

> 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? ...

I find it a bit irritating that anyone would think my buying a product
and then trying to use it is "parasitic" in any sense.  Or does this
imply Apollo and IBM are not legally licensing Unix?

>           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.

And the various enhancements Sun has provided are not proprietary?  None
have been posted to the net, none are submitted to Stallman for inclusion
in GNU and (to the best of my knowledge) Sun would sue me if I ported them
over to my Atari (-:).  As far as the idea of open systems go, I find
System V no more an open system than AIX (or MSDOS or OS/360 for that matter)
-- it is totally defined and controlled by AT&T, we may propose changes or
oppose changes, but the owner, author, and final authority is one company:
AT&T.  POSIX and perhaps GNU are open systems, and as I understand it IBM
is committed to implementing POSIX (AT&T is not).

> Let's hope they get what they deserve, which is loss of sales to other
> vendors who offer "common UNIX" with value added.

And again, is "common UNIX" defined?  Is it what Sun and AT&T call it?
And what value can you add, when you have to play catch up with a secretly
developed standard.  (In case you haven't got the point, I like publicly
established standards like POSIX much better than private ones, and I would
be even more vitrolic about a standard developed in secret by one of my
competitors -- and a vendor with whom I am now finding myself in competition).

Perhaps this is more the reverse, we have two companies trying to establish
a proprietary operating system and deny the fact by calling it "common UNIX".

Charles Marslett
chasm at killer.UUCP
STB Systems, Inc.
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