att & osf

[Henry Spencer]

In article <3395 at vpk4.UUCP> scott at attcan.UUCP (Scott MacQuarrie) writes:
>AT&T, due to legal restrictions, was not allowed to sell or make a profit
>from UNIX for almost its entire early existance. Rather then leave it on a
>shelf until it faded away, AT&T GAVE it away to educational entities for
>the price of a tape. How many corporations have you seen do that? ...

Well, let us not credit AT&T with too much altruism.  They were forbidden
to sell Unix, yes, but they were also required to share their technology
with others, since development of said technology was done with money
derived from a regulated monopoly.  They weren't *allowed* to just leave
it on the shelf, if I understand the legalities correctly.

>When the UNIX market balkinized and UNIX begen to become incompatible with
>versions of itself. AT&T developed the System V Interface Definition at its
>own expense, in order to provide a standard for UNIX. This now enables vendors
>to make their versions of UNIX compatible with each other...

Again, altruism is not the word for it.  Do remember that there have already
been two releases of the SVID, and nobody seriously believes there won't be
more.  What this enables vendors to do is to constantly scramble to keep up
with AT&T's definition of What Unix Is This Week.  Said definition being
based, of course, on what AT&T is already delivering.  It should be no
surprise to anyone that there is a lot of enthusiasm for POSIX -- a *stable*
standard which is *not* controlled by one company.

>When AT&T changed the source license agreement for System V 3.x to state
>that no vendor could use the source code to create a UNIX which was not
>compatible with the SVID, this meant that no vendor could use our product
>to create a proprietary operating system which was incompatible with other
>version of System V 3.x. My, how greedy of us.

See above comments on the Unix Of The Week.  Yes, how greedy of you!

>... show me another vendor which has worked as hard   
>to provide a truly hardware independent operating system to allow customers
>to feely decide what hardware they need to solve their problems...

Provided, of course, that they end up choosing AT&T hardware.  Come now;
this is really laying it on a bit too thick.  There are many things AT&T
could have done to make hardware independence easier, and they have done
very few of them.  The only reason it hasn't been worse is that AT&T has
done such an inept job of making and selling its own computers, meaning
that they haven't been a serious competitor.  This is why various hardware
manufacturers sounded Red Alert when AT&T and Sun got together to decide
Unix's future.
-- 
MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
smells that way.               | uunet!mnetor!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu