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

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Climbing momentarily onto a soapbox...

I'm really, really tired of hearing all the OSF sponsors moaning that
"AT&T & Sun's relationship will put all the other companies at a
disadvantage for N months after release of SysVRel(M+1) while we port
it to our machines."

Question: So what else is new?  When was the last time that AT&T
involved its competitors heavily in a new release of SysV?  How many
other companies had a significant part in the actual development of
SysVRel4?  Who helped AT&T with SysVRel3?  What co-sponsors were there
of SysVRel2?

All other companies, including Sun, have been playing catch-up to
AT&T's releases since Day One.  This is nothing new.  Claims to the
contrary by OSF sponsors are red herrings, useless in logical
discussion due to the evidence of the past weighing against them.
Nothing in the AT&T/Sun plan changes that.  The A/S plan provides for
the development of the merged UNIX system - little more than that -
and therefore for the day when I won't have to say "#ifdef BSD" and
mutter the same functional phrases in my programs twice.  OSF, if it
goes anywhere at all, will force me right back into this mode with
"#ifdef OSFMumblix" and a different pair of code fragments to do the
same things 2 ways.

A short digression concerning the need for a merged UNIX: I disagree
with claims (from folks like csg at pyramid and others) that the merge is
not needed, not required, not being requested by customers.  Sorry,
csg, I *can't* agree - Pyramid in particular is in a funny position
with its dual-universe port.  Pyramid's customers aren't asking for it
because they've already got it - and I say that as a Pyramid customer.
But Pyramid's solution (dual port) is different from Sun's solution to
date (partial merge) which is different from HP's solution (SysVified
4.2BSD with retrofitted enhancements) which is different from...
everybody else's solution to the problem of getting both BSD and SysV
capabilities into a single box.  How much time does each company which
advertises some variant of "both universes" or "SysV with BSD
enhancements" or "pick-your-buzzphrase" spend in the creation of their
local incarnation of a merge?  I think it must unavoidably be rather a
lot.  Pyramid supports 4.3BSDish UUCP in the UCB universe plus HDB in
the ATT universe...

It just occurred to me that HP, while joining in the chorus of "we're
at a disadvantage due to delay," has voluntarily put itself in an even
worse position: HP wants to be SysV, thus forcing it to wait on AT&T
releases, and supports NFS and YP, thus forcing it to wait on Sun
releases.  HP has no business claiming that they're suddenly in a
worse position than they used to be in light of the A/S plan; if
anything, their timing will be *improved* by getting an entire release
from a single source at one time.

Now I have to go work on implementing an idea or two I've got for
motivating OSF sponsors to abandon OSF...

Stepping off the soapbox,
--Karl