1. It slows innovation cycles ; committee drag factor.
Yes that has always been a serious problem.
2. Lose competitive edge; giving away tech.
Sun has given away RPC, NIS, RFS (NFS), and has contributed significantly to the expansion of the once useless POSIX API's (especially wrt to threading). This is an edge that they could have kept to differentiate themselves from HP/IBM/SGI etc.
No, most people in the Unix community believe just the opposite.
The Open Systems philosophy says interfaces are public, compete on implementation. Its descendant, the Open Source philosophy, says even implementations are public, compete on service and support. At the other end of the spectrum, Microsoft says "We 'listen to our customers' and are active in the industry, but we own everything." (Translation: "We're a monopoly so if you don't like it go f**k yourself.")
One major reason, though far from the only reason, that Unix lost to Microsoft was that it never could un-fragment itself. Unix was too preoccupied with 'intellectual property', starting with the mad-dog lawyers at AT&T in the 1980's. It's not that anybody lost a competitive technology edge by sharing. It's that, for the first reason you cited, the Unix contingent shared too little too late so that software developers never had a single version to write to, and still don't today.
Frustration with this is one of the psychological underpinnings of Linux' popularity among Unix people. The joke is that Linux, as it grows, may face the same kind of problems.
Regards,
--QwikSand |
