Open Software Foundation

[Chuck Karish]

In the early '70s, I worked in a small machine shop.  It was a job
shop, specializing in abrasive machining: grinding, lapping, and honing
metals and ceramics to close tolerances.  Most of the customers were
other machine shops that subcontracted work to us; they'd send in
semi-finished parts, and we'd grind a particular dimension to size and
ship the parts back.

In early 1972, the owners of the shop decided to expand their business
by opening, as a separate operation, a conventional machine shop.  The
abrasive machining shop immediately began to lose business.  Shops that
had previously been customers stopped sending in jobs, because they
were afraid that if my employer found out what jobs they were doing, he
would try to bid on the whole job, instead of just the abrasive
machining part.  The conventional machine shop was closed after about
six months.

AT&T and Sun are now in a position where their competitors can't afford
to cooperate with them.  They're on record with the policy that there
will be no distribution of source to other vendors until the whole
operating system (System 5.5 or System 6 or whatever they call it) is
finished and official.  This means that Sun and AT&T will have many
months to polish the implementations for their own machines before any
of their competitors see a single line of new code.

The stakes in the Unix game are pretty high now.  The companies that
are forming the OSF are doing so because they can't allow a competitor
to dictate the rules of the game, and give itself a special advantage,
when there are multi-billion-dollar contracts at stake.

I'm not worried that we'll see a new Balkanization of the Unix
community.  POSIX and the FIPS are explicit enough to ensure that
standardization of Unix implementations will continue.  Remember, too,
that IBM and DEC now have large staffs of engineers who are Unix
partisans, who share the concerns of the Unix community at large.

We may soon see some serious competition between Unix vendors on the
basis of the quality of their implementations, rather than of who has
more features.  I'm looking forward to it.

(I speak only for myself.)
Chuck Karish	ARPA:	karish at denali.stanford.edu
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