Ken Olsen on OSF

[Robert Halloran]

Copied from DIGITAL NEWS August 1, 1988, p. 63:

"I'm putting my self-righteous hat on, my preacher's hat", Olsen said. 
"Do you know what IBM and Sun and [AT&T] and HP and us and 20 other
people are going to do?  Each one of us are going to make our Unix better
than anyone else's.  Which means...there are going to be things besides
Posix that are so good that you're going to want to reach in and use
them.  And that's what's going to make them proprietary."

"We invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the thing, and it is going 
to be good because we want to have a better one.  But a better one 
means that something in there's not standard."

"You're going to want to buy ours or IBM's in order to be able to use
our features.  And so we immediately lose much of what we set out to do",
Olsen said.

"We're going to do such a good Unix.  There will be so many features
that people are going to become dependent on, even though it makes
it nontransportable.  And we can support it because our Unix is 
going to be proprietary."

"Proprietary not to be vicious; proprietary because this is going to be
so good.  We're so sure we can do better than anyone else."

-------------------------------end of excerpt--------------------------

If this is the attitude the other OSF members are taking, so much
for portability and unified direction.

						Bob Halloran
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