O'pain Software Foundation: (3) relationship to GNU & openness

[Shankar Unni]

There has been an incredible amount of heat and smoke in the various
discussions I have seen on this issue, and practically no light.

As far as I can see, one *major* motivation for this reaction on the part of
the big 3 (or 2 or 1) has been AT&T's adamant refusal to let *any* of their
potential customers participate in the Unix standardization process. Bill Joy
has been dropping inflammatory statements like comparing the other vendors'
demands to "getting 9 pregnant women together to produce a baby in one month".
And so on.

Don't forget that Unix is no longer the exclusive preserve of small,
workstation-based engineers in the US. European and Asian customers have long
been screaming for a decent standardized OS (which is why the big 3 are
suddenly showing such concern in the issue). They have been traditionally
ignored by almost all the large US companies, and have had little say in
correcting this situation. Well, now they command a significant amount of
clout, and they want a good solution NOW, that addresses all their needs
(national language support, commercial application interface, user interface,
etc etc).

Also, many commercial and defense customers and vendors are showing increasing
interest in a standardized OS, something that can accomplish for the mini and
mainframe market what MSDOS achieved for the PC market.

AT&T and Sun's parochial and short-sighted attitude does nothing to address
these problems. Their attitude seems to be reflected in all the diatribes
emanating from the old-fashioned, berzerkeley jocks on the net ("it's small
and it's mine and I like it and keep your !$^% hands off it and ...")

WAKE UP, GUYS! UNIX HAS HIT THE BIG TIME!!!! Unix is the future of both
commercial and engineering computing, believe it or not. There is no reason
why Unix users cannot have it both ways (lean & efficient, and robust(slow?)
& commercially viable). It just takes a broad viewpoint on the part of the
designers/standardizers. AT&T and Sun have *NOT* inspired any confidence on
the part of the above-mentioned user bases as far as these issues go...

And yes, OSF really wouldn't care to have two UNIX standards around. They'd
much rather that other vendors would see the light (including AT&T and Sun)
and come around to join them in the effort. Remember, in spite of all the
dripping sarcasm and cynicism that has greeted the proposal, OSF *is* really
an independent organization (not a quasi-subsidiary of any of the participants,
not even of *BM)

---
Shankar Unni.

#include <std_disclaimer.h>
These opinions are mine and mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of
my employer and all that..