AT&T arrogance

[Landon C. Noll]

 >I understand AT&T knows they cannot continue to survive with only
 >this constituency, but without it, Un*x (ed: last word modified) wouldn't
 > be alive in the commercial marketplace to survive.

AT&T marketing seems to ignore what brought UN*X up to the level it is at
now.  Their marketing actions seem to be going towards stomping out any
other 'non-standard' UN*X system.  One wonders if down the road, some company
named Carterphone will challenge their trademark of UN*X.  Maybe some small
firm in a last attempt to stay afloat might try to claim that AT&T has engaged
in unfair business practices?  But then again the AT&T legal staff might be
able to delay the legal actions long enough for 'their standard' to be well
established.  My guess is AT&T is already well prepaired in case this happens.

AT&T marketing, in my opinion does not understand what UN*X is.  To me, UN*X
is not a pile of code to which someone at AT&T has blessed.  UN*X is not
a set of source listings that generate a diff listing less than Y inches thick.

UN*X is a way of doing things.  UN*X is a dynamic idea.  The UN*X idea was
started by folks like Ritchie,Kernighan,Thompson (and others) at Bell Labs,
and is even now being enhanced by thousands of others over the world.  UN*X
is people in net.unix-wizards asking for advice.  UN*X is people posting
bug fixes to net.bugs.foo.

To force UN*X into a plastic wrapped package is not UN*X.  To declare all
future versions to be upward compatible is to condemn the users to have to
eat the original design flaws.  UN*X was able to evolve beyond more static
commercial operating systems because people were free to improve it.
This is not to say that some versions of UN*X were not a setback, but rather
that having access to source code and being able to fix/improve it gave
UN*X a big plus.

Anyway let it be known that the above statments are my own and that this
does not reflect any company stand.

chongo <GNU's not UN*X> /\gg/\

BTW: UN*X is a usenet symbol for the 'non-standard' versions of Unix
     Unix is a trademark of AT&T Bell Labs
     AT&T Bell labs are a footnote of Unix  :-)
-- 
    "Don't blame me, I voted for Mondale!"
				John Alton 85'