4BSD is dead???

[J Q Johnson]

In article <1361 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>There are enough features in SVR3 that have no counterpart in 4.3BSD
>that this would be a very good time to merge the functionality of these
>two major UNIX variants.  I'm sure that several vendors will be trying
>to do this anyway; the question is, can we get the principals to adopt
>the combined version rather than continue to diverge?  Who gets to be
>the keeper of the UNIX?

Is there any reason to believe that this process converges?  A plausible
future is one in which all the major vendors (ATT, SUN, DEC, now IBM) claim
to offer versions of UNIX that merge SysV.3 with 4.3BSD, but which are
mutually incompatible.  Perhaps they will agree at the SVID level, but
I get scared when each vendor points proudly to all the improvements
it has made.  A test case might be comatibility of window systems,
OSI networking support, or distributed file systems.

And what about all the "little" vendors who have specialized UNIX ports,
e.g. Sequent, Amdahl (little???), etc.?

My guess is that incompatible UNIX versions will be with us as long as UNIX
is, but they will no longer be bsd vs SysV.