always the same troubles with DEC: curses vs. cursesX

[Win Treese]

This isn't an official Digital statement, and I'm not out to defend all of
Digital's decisions -- just to point out a couple of things.

- /bin/sh is essentially the Bourne shell from BSD.  ULTRIX grew out of
	BSD 4.2 and has a lot of System V-isms now.  One of the decisions was
	to stay with the BSD /bin/sh and add the System V one as /bin/sh5.
	The same is true with make and a few other utilities as well.

- there are at least 3 varieties of curses now -- BSD, System V, and X/Open.
	While it's unfortunate that there is some difficulty in understanding
	how ULTRIX tries to deal with these, especially given unclear
	documentation, it is also hard to engineer a system where they coexist
	to everyone's satisfaction, just as it is with /bin/sh.

I don't really think that Digital is trying to make them "propietary."
The market is an interesting place right now -- customers want the
"best" version of something, yet it must be compatible with everyone
else's versions.  New features (and sometimes bug fixes!) are often
viewed as attempts to make something "proprietary."

I am sometimes astonished at reactions of the form "Company A is a
leader in innovating in open systems" versus "Company B is trying to
sucker us into a proprietary system" versus "Why doesn't company C do
something better?"

I'd be interested in discussion on what an "open system" really is --
and whether or not you'd buy one.  Of course, I don't make any
marketing decions; I'm in research.

Win Treese						Cambridge Research Lab
treese at crl.dec.com					Digital Equipment Corp.