Open Software Foundation

[George W. Leach]

In article <5412 at bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> wesommer at athena.mit.edu (William Sommerfeld) writes:


>... Apollo, Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, IBM,
>Nixdorf, Siemens ...

     This group is a very predictable lot !  Most of them never wanted
to offer UNIX in the first place.  They were forced into it by customer
demand.

>	    NEW FOUNDATION TO ADVANCE SOFTWARE STANDARDS,
                              ^^^^^^^
>	    DEVELOP AND PROVIDE OPEN SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT
 
     More like they want to reimplement the wheel and call it something
else because they don't want to follow AT&T and Sun's lead.

>NEW YORK, N.Y., May 17, 1988---Seven leading computer companies today
>announced an international foundation to develop and provide a
>completely open software environment to make it easier for customers
>to use computers and software from many vendors.

     Huh?   How does creating an alternative standard help do that?
Look at some of the areas of "standardization", like graphics standards,
pick one.


     AT&T and Sun are taking a step that should have been taken years
ago.  It is exactly what the marketplace needs.  And who better to do
it than those who drive the development of the two main strains?
I don't think we want this done by a committee.  On the other hand
one can see the Hamilton Group's problem with this.  They do not want
to have to play catch up all the time.  But in reality, isn't that
what they are doing anyway?  None of those companies has the ability
to effect changes to System V or SunOS (BSD) at the current time.  Why
should Sun and AT&T allow them to in the future?

     There are too many standardization groups out there anyway.  Sun
and AT&T are *doing* something about the problem right now.  Look at
how long the ANSI C effort is taking and that is just one group.  All
of the UNIX-related standardization groups will have to get together
sometime and converge on a single standard.


BTW:  Some of the latest headlines in the trade rags indicate that end
users are not happy about this group spliting off and developing yet
another OS.


-- 
George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
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