O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T?

[Karl Kleinpaste]

rogerk at mips.COM writes:
   AT&T was no threat because it was never a viable competitor in the 
   systems business.

That seems inconsistent.  An awful lot of vendors have been bending
over backwards for several years in order to be able to advertise
their conformity with SysVRelN.  They must have viewed AT&T as a
viable competitor, or else they would not be looking for a way to be
able to claim to provide at least as much capability as AT&T.  It
would be profitless to fight for compatibility with something which
did not matter.  Ergo, AT&T has always mattered; it is and always has
been viewed as a viable competitor.  At the very least, AT&T's lead in
SysV development has always been taken very, very seriously.

Witness IBM's AIX' compatibility with SysVRel[?1?2?] (exactly which is
unclear to me), HP's SVVS-compliant HP-UX, DEC's adoption of similar
standards in the face of losing the USAF contract a year ago, ad
nauseum.

AT&T has been very significant in all these companies' plans for quite
some time.

   >All other companies, including Sun, have been playing catch-up to
   >AT&T's releases since Day One. 
   Yes, but "including Sun" is the key phrase.  Now they are holding an
   inappropriate advantage.

If Sun is so dangerous to everyone else, why have so many companies
been so careful to provide compatibility with so many of Sun's
enhancements, notably including NFS and RPC?  These companies have
been holding their heads in the "lion's mouth" for a rather long time
to be so suddenly disturbed by that position.

@begin[speculation]
I honestly detect a positively horrendous case of "sour grapes."  The
OSF sponsors seem merely upset because they're not the ones that
approached AT&T about such an agreement, preferring (until now) to
work in their own private, proprietary corners until faced with Sun.
If they were so intensely interested in standards, they should not
have waited so long - they should have beaten Sun to the competitive
punch by offering such a deal with AT&T quite some time before.  Does
anyone else notice that the OSF press release reads a lot like early
Sun press releases from, say, 1983 or so?  Does this say anything
about Sun's ability to stay ahead of market demands as well as its
competitors?  By, say, 5 years or so?
@end[speculation]

--Karl