Dave Tweed wrote:
> Olin, you keep saying "Open Software Foundation", but I think you mean
> "Free Software Foundation". Two completely different things.
>
> OSF was the old collaboration between Apollo, Bull, DEC, HP, IBM,
> Nixdorf and Siemens that eventually became "The Open Group".
>
> FSF is the GNU/Richard Stallman organization.

Yup, I meant FSF, the GNU folks, who generally publish their software under
the GPL (GNU Public License).  Sorry for the confusion.

On a side note, I was at Apollo at the time OSF was started, as you were
too.  It sounded like a good idea at the time, but I didn't realize until
much later that it was essentially a deliberate smoke screen to give the
member companies a sales story against Sun and its open software while
continuing with their individual proprietary products as long as possible.
OSF wasn't really supposed to produce anything, only make it look like they
would.  This was not known at the time to the individual engineers who
thought they were working on the operating system of the future.

I wonder how different things would be today if they had been allowed to
finish.  I think a few scattered pieces of the OSF effort have made their
way into the main stream.  I sortof remember that some of today's time
synchronization of nodes on a network came from the OSF effort, but overall
it was largely a waste, as was intended.

I think things would be very different today if Apollo had embraced openness
instead of fighting it.  Aegis was a great operating system, and the Domain
network of 20 years ago was better than any Windows or Unix networking
today.  The only thing they screwed up was graphics accross the network, but
that wasn't inherent in the Domain network architecture.


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