Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!gatech!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!sfmag!der From: der@sfmag.UUCP (D.Rorke) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: att & osf Message-ID: <1276@sfmag.UUCP> Date: 12 Aug 88 19:23:48 GMT References: <4964@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <3395@vpk4.UUCP> <1988Aug5.211217.21037@utzoo.uucp> <2998@homxc.UUCP> <3dcc6110.d8e9@apollo.COM> Organization: AT&T Information Systems, Summit, NJ Lines: 105 Gary Allen responds to a poster who voiced concern over the motives of some of the members of OSF: > You can correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't every single member of OSF > have a UNIX license, and doesn't every one of them sell UNIX in addition > to other products? And isn't it a fact that the 2 companies that you > single out are 2 of the major UNIX suppliers? This misses the point. Yes they all have (as far as I know) some sort of UNIX-like product in their product lines. I suspect that some of them carry it just in case their customers ask for it. The point is, open systems are a major threat to some of the members of OSF. Consider the following scenario: Open systems really catch on in the industry, including useful industry standard interfaces. Various vendors build and market hardware that supports the industry standard operating system environment. Hardware is priced competitively due to the open market (customers can shop around for hardware based on price-performance). Now the biggie - applications developers turn out serious, industrial strength DP applications that run in the standard environment (like payroll and accounting and inventory control applications). Now a data processing manager is faced with a choice (in some cases for the first time). He can continue to pay 10 zillion dollars a month to lease the hardware and software to maintain the environment he has been running since the dawn of time, or he can move to an open environment, end his marriage to a single hardware vendor, and take advantage of new hardware technology at an enormous savings. Sure it's painful and expensive to move to the new environment but it only has to be done once and the long term savings more than justify the cost. This is a scenario that IBM in particular has to be concerned about. They have profited tremendously in the past from the fact that many of their customers have been locked into an IBM environment. This is why it is a little difficult for some of us to believe that intelligent, responsible IBM executives sincerely want open systems to flourish. > > Proprietary systems? Yeah, they all also sell OS's of their own creation, > JUST AS PROPRIETARY AS YOURS, or don't you know what the word means? > In case you don't, I'll quote from Webster (the second definition): > > 1. of, or relating to, or characteristic of a proprietor <~rights>; > 2. used, made, or marketed by one having the exclusive legal > right ; > 3. privately owned and managed and run as a profit-making organization > > > Now which definition is it that makes UNIX non-proprietary? I'm sure > we'd all like to know, since that'd mean we don't have to pay AT&T > any license fees. > > And surely you must know that AT&T considers it to be proprietary, or > perhaps you've never seen (hope I don't get sued for this): > > /* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T */ > /* The copyright notice above does not evidence any */ > /* actual or intended publication of such source code. */ > > Perhaps you mean portable instead of proprietary? Yes, System V source code is proprietary in that those wishing to sell products based on it must pay a licensing fee. Generally when people talk about proprietary systems however they are talking about systems that are offered primarily by a single vendor and are either not licensed to 3rd parties or are so non-portable that they will never run on any other vendor's hardware. In this sense UNIX is a non-proprietary system. > > And by the way, all of these Bad Companies (apologies to John > Paul Rodgers) have every right to sell other products in competition > with your company's, or must I also define capitalism for you as > well? Or perhaps some AT&T folk have the attitude that they're > still guaranteed market, profits, and success? Of course they have a right to compete. In general competition is good for the marketplace. Unfortunately the untimely appearance of OSF is likely to be bad for the marketplace and the industry. It is bad for the customers in the sense that it adds further confusion to a market that was beginning to converge on standards (i.e. the emergence of the POSIX standard and the convergence of Xenix, BSD and System V). OSF will tend to fragment the UNIX market and slow its growth which is bad not only for customers but for other vendors with a real stake in the UNIX market (including some of the members of OSF). I really believe that those members of OSF that have a real stake in the success of open systems (like Apollo) would have been better off if they had stuck with existing/emerging standards and OSF had never been formed. > > Gary Allen > Apollo Computer > Chelmsford, MA > {decvax,yale,umix,mit-eddie}!apollo!gallen > > Oh yeah, the opinions herein expressed aren't worth 2 bits and aren't > condoned by anyone that really counts. You said it, not me. Dave Rorke AT&T Bell Laboratories Summit, NJ attunix!der