It was inevitable that the Open Software Foundation would form one of the main talking points at last week’s European Unix Users Show, and fortuitious that a previously-arranged talk on Unix directions invloving IBM and AT&T at the conference could be used as a discussion forum for the issues. But in order not to be outdone by DEC fielding Ken Olsen to defend the Foundation, Sun Microsystems responded by sending its own heavyweight, co-founder and technical director Bill Joy – at the same time as his oppo, Scott McNealy was having his say across the Atlantic (CI No 947). Joy fiercely questioned the motives of the Foundation members. Standards are set in the marketplace, not by committees, he said. The Open Software Foundation is an attempt to kidnap and bury the competition. It is simply a list of non-controversial standards that AT&T and Sun already support. Joy said that it was easy to come up with a sub-set of standards, but that Foundation members had not made any commitment to getting rid of incompatibilities arising from proprietary extensions to, for instance, Fortran. He also poured scorn on fears that Sun would be optimising Unix to fit round the Sparc processor. The secret of doing that is to write a good C compiler, he suggested. For the Open Software Foundation to be convincing, said Joy, its members should commit to compatibility with V.4 (thus bringing together the Unix, Xenix and Berkeley variants), and drop their own proprietary Unix versions. Without V.4 compatibility, the Foundation is just a big hoax, and basing it on IBM’s AIX makes everyone else a plug-compatible manufacturer, he jeered.
