Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!princeton!udel!rochester!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!oliveb!sun!gorodish!guy From: guy@gorodish.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T? Message-ID: <55368@sun.uucp> Date: 3 Jun 88 19:13:28 GMT References: <356@mipseast.mips.COM> <1962@ssc-vax.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.uucp Lines: 33 Posted: Fri Jun 3 15:13:28 1988 > Somehow this strikes me as naive...OSF strikes me as the trojan horse > that is waiting to be brought into the city walls...every single sponser > is selling a rival proprietary system... Well, of the major names associated with OSF: IBM sells a variety of IBM-specific OSes as well as two Microsoft OSes; however, on at least one of their machines (the RT PC), UNIX is (as far as I know) the only OS. I don't think MVS sells as a UNIX competitor; I don't see all that mainframe software being converted to UNIX tomorrow, so I don't think MVS has anything to fear from UNIX in the near term. DEC does sell VMS as well as selling ULTRIX. Apollo does sell DOMAIN/OS, which includes an Aegis environment. HP sells MPE on the Spectra (before anybody complains, note that "spectra" is the plural of "spectrum"); *however*, I don't think they sell it at all in *competition* with UNIX. HP seems pretty solidly committed to UNIX, even if you don't consider the others solidly committed to UNIX. The various other names (I'm not sure which of them qualify as "sponsors") include several that have been pushing UNIX: Honeywell-Bull, NCR, etc.. Even for the majors that do sell non-UNIX OSes in competition with UNIX, I see no indication that any of them are, as corporations, solidly opposed to UNIX. I suspect there are camps within IBM and DEC, at least, that would like UNIX to go away (I think Apollo, whose own OS may not be as able to stand on its own as VMS or some of IBM's can, is less likely to have such camps); however, I suspect that there are also camps within IBM and DEC that would like their companies to get a significant share of the UNIX market.