O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T?

[Brandon S. Allbery]

As quoted from <360 at mipseast.mips.COM> by rogerk at mips.COM (Roger B.A. Klorese):
+---------------
| In article <54544 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
| >In response to Glenn Weinberg:
| >>       (Now, AT&T and probably Sun will deny that a SPARC-only
| >> 	ABI was ever their intention, but if you believe that, I too have
| >> 	a bridge to sell you.)
| >Well, I believe it, but then I have the disadvantage of working at Sun and
| >being too close to the facts; if you're coming from the outside, you can
| >believe or disbelieve all sorts of things without having the facts get in the
| >way.  
| 
| ...Or maybe there was some marketing decision they felt was too poisonous for
| you techies to hear.  At last year's UNIX Expo in New York, a representative
| of Sun Home Office Marketing presented the notion, in a seminar on "Big Iron
| on Wall Street", that if the vendors of minisupers would only drop their 
| proprietary hardware and use SPARC, they'd be able to jump on "the ABI, the
| only source of shrink-wrapped UNIX software".  Seems pretty explicit to me.
+---------------

Sigh.

People, I have *yet* to meet a salesman who got technical issues right.
Before you go off flaming ABI proponents, remember the following:

If you tell a marketing type that "we're coming up with an application
binary interface in order to be able to sell shrink-wrap software -- of
course, an ABI only works on a single CPU type", it's fairly certain that
the marketing type will NOT recognize that the limitation is the fact that a
68020 ABI will *never* work on a SPARC CPU.  Instead, the marketing type
will conclude that you want the ABI for exactly one CPU type -- marketing-
type thinking.  (Keep in mind that to be at all workable, the concept of an
ABI would *have* to have been developed by tech types -- the salesmen would
insist on an ABI that spanned all processor types, since they don't know any
better.)

Don't assume ill will where common stupidity is sufficient.
-- 
Brandon S. Allbery			  | "Given its constituency, the only
uunet!marque,sun!mandrill}!ncoast!allbery | thing I expect to be "open" about
Delphi: ALLBERY	       MCI Mail: BALLBERY | [the Open Software Foundation] is
comp.sources.misc: ncoast!sources-misc    | its mouth."  --John Gilmore