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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Subject: Re: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part 4 (copyright & derived works)
In-Reply-To: tg@cs.toronto.edu's message of 16 Feb 93 15:13:23 GMT
Message-ID: <BZS.93Feb16143724@world.std.com>
Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: The World
References: <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu>
<1993Feb3.175211.13214@igor.tamri.com> <C23r6s.590@sugar.neosoft.com>
<BZS.93Feb13221411@world.std.com>
<93Feb16.101301edt.1217@smoke.cs.toronto.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1993 19:37:24 GMT
Lines: 43
>I don't think that the Novell deal will be completed until
>there is a clear winner of the suit. If USL has the judgement
>go against them, then Novell might well wonder, "is what
>we are buying really all that valuable?"
With all due respect I think that Novell is smarter than that sort of
over-simplicity. That presumes that BSDI/Net2 somehow trashes USL's
ability to make money in the market place, highly unlikely, unless USL
is just not capable of competing which may be true and what motivates
their reliance litigiousness.
It's not hard to argue that the complete opposite would occur: BSDI et
al making Unix much more ubiquitous and continuing that tradition of
experimenting with new features in Unix which can, if successful,
later be adopted by more conservative vendors.
That's how much of SVR4 came about, by adopting features which first
appeared in BSD. Being as few sites, particularly universities, have
unix sources any longer USL winning would bring all that innovation to
a virtual halt and turn Unix into just another corporate proprietary
OS with the usual obsession with implementing 25 year old features
like fancy print spool software to distinguish burst from narrow from
whatever printers and pecking-order implementation, not to mention
customer specials of little general interest but golly gee important
to make that <insert fortune 100 company name> sale! (and of course
the ever popular unbundling and other methods of trying to squeeze
more and more revenue out of less and less product, lack of innovative
ability drives one to that I suppose.)
Let's take one example to chew on: Without BSD where would TCP-IP be
today? Well, who knows, but even with its incredible success USL only
picked it up in the last couple of years. Not a very encouraging data
point about who will lead technical innovation. Even right to the
bitter end no doubt USL is gleaning things to incorporate from the BSD
releases. The fable about killing the goose who laid the golden eggs
comes to mind.
--
-Barry Shein
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