Open Software Foundation

[Marc Gibian]

I have a few personal observations on the OSF which I believe are 
independent of the fact that I am employed by the company that initiated 
its creation.

It seems to me that the needs of the users, and therefore of software
vendors, have not yet been addressed by the computer industry.  Users
want to be able to treat computer hardware and their operating systems
like other technological products, such as radios, TVs, tape recorders,
etc....  The success of UNIX to date is due to the fact that it more 
closely approaches this goal than any other operating system, to date.  A
major reason for this is that it has been ported to a multitude of machines,
initially by the accademic community, and then by commercial vendors.
(due to ease of porting and the need for a standard)

The OSF is to me an industry statement that the defacto standard
that is the ATT supplied UNIX is no longer an adequate solution to the
problem.  Many reasons have been stated in previous postings so I will
not attempt to list them.  I do believe that OSF offers a better solution
than the current mechanism because it is:

1)  An organization with the sole purpose of providing a single
    set of software to be the base software for all hardware platforms
    (that choose to use it).

2)  An organization commited to providing platform independent base
    software.

3)  An organization to provide a common software implementation of various
    computer standards, such as POSIX.

4)  An organization NOT commited to selling any product that sells due
    to factors other than the three previous factors.

There is a lot of speculation about the motivations behind IBM and DEC,
and about particularly IBM's contribution of AIX.  It strikes me that AIX
is mearly a starting point... That the diversity of the original sponsors,
and their hardware products, insures significant evolution from this base.
I do not think that the presence of the European companies should be
minimized.

The ability of OSF to sell its product is directly tied to how well it
provides the standard platform that the users need.  This is our best
assurance that it will do just that.

Marc S. Gibian

email:  marc at apollo.UUCP