Splinter Unix?

[Guy Harris]

> Because AT&T doesn't want to sell those rights to anyone, but rather, 
> protect its investment in offering the only platforms which will be UNIX 
> on day one of release, namely their own products and those developed by 
> their soon-to-be-subsidiary, Sun Microsystems.

I assume you don't mean "wholly-owned subsidiary" here; the AT&T/Sun contract
constrains them not to buy > 20% (or maybe 25%) unless somebody *else* tries to
take Sun over.

The "soon-to-be-subsidiary" is pure speculation; could *all* sides please try
to improve the tone of this debate by refraining from speculation as much as
possible?  I suspect I could come up with several mutually-contradictory
speculations about any of the parties on any side of this debate, all of which
could, by a selective look at the data, sound completely believable.

One could certainly assume that AT&T and Sun plan to restrict UNIX to their
platforms as much as possible (given that both AT&T and Sun have 80386-based
machines, of course, this means that '386 machines would be among those
platforms).

One could certainly assume that the OSF plans to "confuse" the marketplace to
keep it from choosing UNIX (given that HP seems to sell its non-UNIX OS
completely separately from their UNIX systems, I very much doubt that HP sees
this as the goal; I won't make any claims about the others because I'm sure,
for example, that *somebody* would flame bitterly either if I said DEC was
firmly behind UNIX *or* if I said DEC didn't care about UNIX).

One could also assume that the Trilateral Commission and the Bavarian
Illuminati are responsible for the assassination of <fill in a public figure
here>.

By and large, little of the discussion I have seen on this issue - from *any*
side - has contributed much light, although it's contributed its share of heat.
My attitude towards it is best summarized by Chance the gardener's line from
*Being There* - "I like to watch."