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

[Nathaniel Mishkin]

In article <10978 at steinmetz.ge.com> davidsen at crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <24369 at pyramid.pyramid.com> sas at pyrps5.pyramid.com (Scott Schoenthal) writes:
>
>| But, it is proprietary.  Customers have to sign licenses.  Customers have to
>| pay money.  Customers have to perform certain obligations (e.g., passing
>| SVVS).  Is this not 'proprietary'?
>
>  The only reason SRV has been as portable as it has is that there is a
>reasonable validation suite, and you must meet it. It is not perfect,
>but to the user it gives a fighting chance that system will support a
>product.  Ada used to be that way, but now that there is no longer a
>requirement to pass the validation suite, I see some real crap compilers
>called Ada.
>
>  Does it hurt the other vendors to have to deliver a working product?
>Obviously they think so, they put up $90 mil to be able to do what they
>want with they version of UNIX, making it probably that there will be
>100 flavors of OSFix, AIX, or whatever. This will provide a nice set of
>proprietary o/s to keep the vendor happy.

I don't know how many people have had to deal with SVVS, but Apollo has.
(Apollo's OS version that's in beta test passes SVVS.)  It's not fun.
It's not fun unless you started with AT&T's source code.  It's not fun
if your view of the world extends beyond 1970s timesharing systems.  It's
not fun if you want to add functionality because SVVS has a way of thinking
certain added functionality is "bugs".  SVVS is a little worse than "not
perfect".

The Ada analogy doesn't hold up.  No one is changing and/or adding new
features to Ada every 12-18 months.  If AT&T adds some feature to System
V and tests for that feature SVVS, if I want to ship the next version of
my system, and my system contains System V stuff in it, I have to make
that feature work, but fast.

And from what I've heard, the problems with the "obligations" go beyond
SVVS.  I'm afraid that since the details of all this (presumably) appears
in contracts which (a) I've never actually seen (only hear about), and
(b) for all I know could contain restrictions about what parts of it
can be made public, I can't say any more.  I'm sure there are some bright
people out there who could supply more information though.
-- 
                    -- Nat Mishkin
                       Apollo Computer Inc.
                       Chelmsford, MA
                       {decvax,mit-eddie,umix}!apollo!mishkin