Gunther,
Congratulations for your note on Open Source, it was much appreciated!
As a former OSFer, let me comment on the following:
> One can tell more stories about the X11 project, especially the painful
> period under the "Open Software Foundation" (OSF) that tried to do
> the impossible: develop open software under a closed source model.
At that time, "The Open Group" was the company that merged OSF, X/Open and the X
consortium (the guys working on X). I don't have any comments on the strategy chosen
here except that the engineers were not too happy of the legal mumbo-jumbo of the
terms of distribution.
> Motif was quite successful and bogged down the open source world, because
> back then, most of the more polished GUIs were based on Motif and thus
> could not really participate in the open source world.
OSF was a not-for-profit organization, a consortium of IBM, Digital, HP, ... funded to
develop a common platform for the "sponsors". Motif is part of the greater "common
desktop environment" (CDE) that can be found on HP workstations for example. As a
source of revenues for the sponsors and OSF, the sources could not be donated.
> OSF did two
> more notable projects: the OSF/1 Unix clone (adopted only by DEC,
> now called Tru64 under Compaq)
OSF/1, a clone? The UNIX trademark belongs to OSF, sorry, TOG... OSF/1 was created in
the same spirit to have a common platform and is a fully-fledged UNIX system. OSF/1 is
also adopted by Eastern countries and run on intel and on hitachi for example. OSF/1
was much in advance and you will not be surprized to know that it successfully passed
Y2K without patches! Mach (a microkernel with lots of features, such as real-time,
SSI, ... :-) and unix servers to run on top of it (OSF/1 AD, OSF/1) were also
succesful. Mach is also in the public domain and is also the kernel for MkLinux: Mach
and a Linux server on top of it (ported on PPC, on HP-PA,). The first running Linux on
PPC was a MkLinux!
> and of course the Distributed Computing
> Environment DCE. DCE was a close forefather of CORBA, one should
> know.
Not exactly. DCE and CORBA appeared at the same time, and there has been discussion to
know whether to base DCE on CORBA or not at that time -since CORBA was just a concept,
it was decided to start from scratch-. DCE is along the line of CORBA (registry, RPC,
etc.) but is much more: it is based on Kerberos 4 to provide secure communications.
Although the source of DCE has long been closed, the RFCs were not. Microsoft has thus
taken the RFC of the RPC layer to build ... COM! Later, the RPC layer has also been
donated as open source. DCE now lives in different flavors and under different names
at DASCOM, IBM, ...
> But DCE and OSF/1 was not open source, which may be the reason
> why DCE really didn't fly all too well.
Not only. DCE offers secure environments. So you have to know what is a cell, what
entities and permissions to set, ... and have your apps build on top of DCE. It was
deemed too heavy to administer and to deploy, resulting in a limited acceptance
(mainly the finance and banking companies, bookmakers, ...). Note that W2000 will
bring exactly the same thing and might well succeed, although these are closed
sources! Just a question of maturity? of marketing?
Just my 2 (euro)cents :-)
-Yves
Yves Paindaveine
European Commission - Information Society DG (formerly DGXIII)
Avenue de Beaulieu 29, BU29 3/27, B-1160 Bruxelles
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel: +32.2.296.85.48 fax: +32.2.296.0181
