att & osf

[Malaclypse the Elder]

In article <1988Aug5.211217.21037 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <3396 at vpk4.UUCP> scott at attcan.UUCP (Scott MacQuarrie) writes:
> >As I understand it, we were not forced to share any of our developed 
> >technologies prior to 1984. We were simply not allowed to make a profit
> >from them...
> 
> I could be wrong, but my impression is that one of the Consent Decrees
> required licensing on reasonable terms to all comers.  I know of at
> least one occasion when lawsuits were being considered over possible
> refusal to release technology (although of course that may just mean
> that the potential plaintiffs were going to try it on speculation).
> 
i also believe that we were under no obligation to provide our
developed technologies.  i do remember someone attempting to get
such technologies thru an argument that went like: "public money
funds the phone company so we should have a right to anything they
develop".  i believe that we were a regulated monopoly and not a
public utility.
> 
> That's not what I said, and not what I meant.  I didn't say it would not run
> on non-AT&T equipment; I said AT&T was making no serious attempt to make it
> easy to port it to non-AT&T equipment.  Last time I looked, SysV still had
> quite a bit of code that dereferences NULL pointers, a known portability
> problem (and coding error) that AT&T has made no effort to fix.  You were
> the one claiming that they were bending over backwards to make it portable;
> well, when are they going to fix the NULL-pointer bugs?
> 
is this really a portability issue or is this an issue of supporting
a base of applications out there that dereferences NULLs?  are you
confusing application portability with operating system portability?
as far as operating system portability, it seems that both at&t and
sun have BENT OVER BACKWARDS to increase the portability of the
operating system over the past 5 years.  while everyone was taking
nasty pokes at the fact that System V did not have demand paging
for so many years, people at at&t were working on an architecture
that would be portable.  the regions based architecture turned out
to be pretty nice.  sun has also done quite a bit of work on isolating
hardware dependencies.

and perhaps the driving force behind this is not altruism.  both
at&t and sun have found themselves selling and supporting a number
of different processors.  it behooves everyone involved if the
the differences were easily identified and localized.

anyone who has been tracking the kernel source would know that
hardware dependencies are getting more and more localized in the
source.  it is pretty ridiculous to me how anyone can claim that
the system can possibly be optimized for a particular architecture
when SVID talks about user interfaces and kernel source is available
to adapt to one's architecture.  sure, a certain model of computation
is assumed, but the parallel machine people aren't crying foul, its
the people with the same old tired machines.  (oops starting to preach).

> 
> It was the result of the company with the most influence on Unix, AT&T,
> which is simultaneously the supplier of Unix and the setter of de-facto
> standards for it, allying itself with one particular hardware supplier.
> Many people see this as a major conflict of interest for AT&T; how can
> it remain the paragon of evenhandedness that you claim it is, when it has
> climbed into bed with one manufacturer to the exclusion of the others?
> 
there is only a conflict of interest if one believes that a particular
hardware architecture can really affect a specification for a user/programmer
interface.  i don't know if this has been addressed but, has anyone named
one aspect of the SVID that actually gives either the 3b2 or SPARC an advantage?
> 
> Its full potential as a source of revenue for AT&T.  That is how profit-
> making corporations, like AT&T nowadays, work.  This does not necessarily
> have anything to do with its full potential as useful software for the
> rest of us.  In particular, note that changing the rules regularly, so
> that AT&T and its intimate partners consistently stay ahead of the rest
> of the manufacturers, is very much in the financial best interests of AT&T
> and its stockholders.  AT&T is not a philanthropic institution; it is
> required to put the interests of its stockholders first.
> 
> I'm not anti-AT&T, I'm anti-certain-AT&T-policies.  I am pleased and
> grateful for AT&T Canada's support of Usenet hereabouts, but I am not
> bribable (not at this price, anyway!) and do not see that the two issues
> are connected.
i don't really see how the two are connected either except that i don't
see how at&t's support of usenet can be seen as anything but philanthropic.
has nothing to do with at&t's designs on System V, but it does show that
we do have alot to be grateful for.

at&t (and any large corporation) is made up of many different people,
departments, etc.  even if some "policy maker" thought it would be a
good idea to "optimize" System V for the 3b2, for example, i for one
could not see how it could be done given that source is distributed
and given that such high level source has been organized to isolate
and localize machine dependencies.

and i believe that the founders of osf have different desires and
goals.  while i believe that those members of osf whose systems
depend on a widely accessible "definition" of the unix operating
system truly felt locked out, i believe that at least two founding
members have goals other than what is stated.  open systems are
still the last thing on both ibm's and dec's minds (here i am talking
about the higher ups...not the people who are working on open systems
within their respective companies).  the majority of the systems they
sell are proprietary and none of the talk of open systems has changed
the way they market their main money makers.

i myself am most paranoid and imagine the worst possible scenarios.
perhaps someone out there can answer some questions about osf independence
from its founders.  for example, to whom must a non-profit corporate
answer to?  does it have stockholders?  is it possbile for a large
corporation to buy up a non-profit organization?  (here i am assuming
that the osf is a non-profit corporation).  if the osf were to gain
a large share of the unix market, is there any possible way for ibm
to yank its porting base away and make it proprietary (or at least
charge outrageous prices for it)?

any opinions i have expressed are my own.

danny chen
att!homxc!dwc