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

[Guy Harris]

> Getting an ABI is not as simple as you state. DEC cannot get an ABI for
> the VAX. AT&T wouldn't allow it.

What does "get an ABI" mean here?  In some sense, there already exists an ABI
for the VAX, defined by Ultrix; it's not as if other people are out there
building VAX clones with their own OSes, etc.

AT&T may not be willing to put their imprimatur on such an ABI, but that's a
different matter.  However, if it is the case that, say, you get early access
to code from AT&T iff you have an ABI agreement with AT&T, I agree that this
unfairly favors vendors with whom they have ABI agreements.

> Read the operative words here: SVR3 license *DOES NOT ALLOW* you to
> ship man pages.

SVR3 tape *DOES NOT CONTAIN* man pages, so I'm not surprised the SVR3 licence
doesn't cover them.  We (Sun) signed a separate license with AT&T so that we
could 1) get the S5R3 machine-readable documentation and 2) ship documents -
including machine-readable man pages - derived from those documents.  (And no,
before you ask, we signed this stuff before we signed the agreement announced
on October 19.)

Whether UNIX should be unbundled to that degree is a separate argument.

> AT&T controls the content of you distribution. Anything you add becomes
> the property of AT&T,

I second Eduardo Krell's comments on this.  SunView is not AT&T's property, for
example; if you claim that *anything* you add to your UNIX distribution becomes
AT&T's property, you'd better cite chapter and verse of the license if you
expect to convince me of this.