O'pain Software Foundation: (3) relationship to GNU & openness

[John Gilmore]

I see too much resemblance between "Open Software Foundation"
and "Free Software Foundation".  Given its constituency, the only
thing I expect to be "open" about it is its mouth.  While Apollo
might have learned how to survive in an open systems market (I'm
keeping an open mind about that :-), IBM and DEC hate it like poison.
The name is just a marketing gimmick, like the "Citizens for Decency,
Justice, and the American Way" type political committees.

If the Free Software Foundation feels that its name has been unfairly
infringed upon, I would be glad to back it in a lawsuit, and I suspect
that other GNU users would rally to its support.

OSF could have chosen to take an approach like GNU, but deliberately
spurned it.  I personally put some of the Hamilton Group people in
touch with the GNU leadership, as did Rich $alz.  While I could believe
that a bunch of lawyer-bound companies might not want Richard Stallman
in charge of their new Unix-clone project (though his track record so
far is amazingly good), they could have chosen to write their code
under the same terms (anyone can distribute sources for any price, but
with no restrictions on redistribution; distributing binaries at any
price requires you to distribute matching sources at copying cost for 3
years).  GNU has written some large parts of Unix and more are under
way; OSF could have contributed much of the remaining work and come up
with a complete, modern, working, non-AT&T, public source code clone of
Unix.  The fact that they didn't speaks volumes to me about their
motives.

They want to keep this software under corporate control.  They will be
"open" with each other, not with their customers.  The whole brouhaha
is a standard "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, doubt)-generating marketing
operation.  AT&T and Sun have made an effort to make it possible to
run the same applications software on hundreds of manufacturer's machines.
If the OSF companies ship systems that, while compatible with Posix,
have lots of extraneous differences from Unix, portable applications will 
be hard to find, and there will remain a market for applications that
run on VMS, MVS, Domain, and other proprietary systems.  If Sun and
AT&T succeed, an applications company will be able to cover the whole
market by writing an application once, and the resulting depth and breadth
of applications will obsolete applications that run only on the
proprietary systems, thereby obsoleting the proprietary OS's.  IBM,
DEC, HP, and Apollo have a lot to gain by making Sun and AT&T fail at this.

If/when OSF ships a product, their next move is to start claiming that
Sun and AT&T, who pushed the whole midrange computer market market wide
open(*), are pushing "proprietary" software.  You read it here first, folks...

	John Gilmore

(*) AT&T did it unwittingly, by licensing Unix out cheaply before
they could sell software, thereby making it possible for all kinds of
new hardware to come with compatible operating systems.  Sun did it
deliberately, because it was a foot in the door, an advantage for
buyers that a small company could supply better than, say, DEC.  It is
a struggle for Sun to stay open as it grows, but so far it seems equal
to the challenge.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu        gnu at toad.com
"Use the Source, Luke...."