Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T? Message-ID: <14807@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 1 Jun 88 19:21:18 GMT References: <24369@pyramid.pyramid.com> <10978@steinmetz.ge.com> <14181@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <359@mipseast.mips.COM> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Lines: 48 In-reply-to: rogerk@mips.COM's message of 27 May 88 17:48:54 GMT rogerk@mips.COM writes: AT&T was no threat because it was never a viable competitor in the systems business. That seems inconsistent. An awful lot of vendors have been bending over backwards for several years in order to be able to advertise their conformity with SysVRelN. They must have viewed AT&T as a viable competitor, or else they would not be looking for a way to be able to claim to provide at least as much capability as AT&T. It would be profitless to fight for compatibility with something which did not matter. Ergo, AT&T has always mattered; it is and always has been viewed as a viable competitor. At the very least, AT&T's lead in SysV development has always been taken very, very seriously. Witness IBM's AIX' compatibility with SysVRel[?1?2?] (exactly which is unclear to me), HP's SVVS-compliant HP-UX, DEC's adoption of similar standards in the face of losing the USAF contract a year ago, ad nauseum. AT&T has been very significant in all these companies' plans for quite some time. >All other companies, including Sun, have been playing catch-up to >AT&T's releases since Day One. Yes, but "including Sun" is the key phrase. Now they are holding an inappropriate advantage. If Sun is so dangerous to everyone else, why have so many companies been so careful to provide compatibility with so many of Sun's enhancements, notably including NFS and RPC? These companies have been holding their heads in the "lion's mouth" for a rather long time to be so suddenly disturbed by that position. @begin[speculation] I honestly detect a positively horrendous case of "sour grapes." The OSF sponsors seem merely upset because they're not the ones that approached AT&T about such an agreement, preferring (until now) to work in their own private, proprietary corners until faced with Sun. If they were so intensely interested in standards, they should not have waited so long - they should have beaten Sun to the competitive punch by offering such a deal with AT&T quite some time before. Does anyone else notice that the OSF press release reads a lot like early Sun press releases from, say, 1983 or so? Does this say anything about Sun's ability to stay ahead of market demands as well as its competitors? By, say, 5 years or so? @end[speculation] --Karl