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

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <14181 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl at triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:
>Nothing in the AT&T/Sun plan changes that.  The A/S plan provides for
>the development of the merged UNIX system - little more than that -
>and therefore for the day when I won't have to say "#ifdef BSD" and
>mutter the same functional phrases in my programs twice.  OSF, if it
>goes anywhere at all, will force me right back into this mode with
>"#ifdef OSFMumblix" and a different pair of code fragments to do the
>same things 2 ways.

This is right on the mark.  Application development is hindered by
the existence of slightly different variants of the UNIX programming
environment.  Even the current hybrids of BSD and SysV suffer from
this.  The systems came close enough together with 4.3BSD and SVR3
to make it feasible to attempt to really merge them for once and for
all and to provide a single good naive-user interface.  If we can
get the UNIX vendors to all start shipping systems with the common
merged application support environment, then that would help UNIX
considerably in the marketplace, due to improved quantity and
availability of useful applications.  To compete with systems such
as OS/2, such a unified front seems to be essential.  The last thing
we needed was for yet another UNIX variant to arise.  Whoever is
pushing that either does not have the interests of the UNIX community
at heart, or they haven't been paying close attention to the factors
that have really been hindering the spread of UNIX.