upstart company in Redmond, Washington. To calm the fears of IBM, Intel, DEC, and other com-
puter companies, the UNIX Lab made the following commitments to ensure a level playing field:
Source code only -- Instead of producing its own boxed set of UNIX, AT&T continued
to sell only source code and to make it available equally to all licensees. Each company
would then port UNIX to its own equipment. It wasn't until about 1992, when the lab
was spun off as a joint venture with Novell (called Univel), and then eventually sold to
Novell, that a commercial boxed set of UNIX (called UnixWare) was produced directly
from that source code.
Published interfaces -- To create an environment of fairness and community to its
OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), AT&T began standardizing what different
ports of UNIX had to be able to do to still be called UNIX. To that end, Portable
Operating System Interface (POSIX) standards and the AT&T UNIX System V Interface
Definition (SVID) were specifications UNIX vendors could use to create compliant UNIX
systems. Those same documents also served as road maps for the creation of Linux.
In an early e-mail newsgroup post, Linus Torvalds made a request for a copy, preferably
online, of the POSIX standard. I think that nobody from AT&T expected someone to
actually be able to write their own clone of UNIX from those interfaces, without using any of its
UNIX source code.
Technical approach -- Again, until the very end of USL, most decisions on the direction
of UNIX were made based on technical considerations. Management was promoted up
through the technical ranks and to my knowledge there was never any talk of writing
software to break other companies' software or otherwise restrict the success of USL's
partners.
When USL eventually started taking on marketing experts and creating a desktop UNIX product
for end users, Microsoft Windows already had a firm grasp on the desktop market. Also, because
the direction of UNIX had always been toward source-code licensing destined for large computing
systems, USL had pricing difficulties for its products. For example, on software it was including
with UNIX, USL found itself having to pay out per-computer licensing fees that were based on
$100,000 mainframes instead of $2,000 PCs. Add to that the fact that no application programs
were available with UnixWare, and you can see why the endeavor failed.
Successful marketing of UNIX systems at the time, however, was happening with other computer
companies. SCO had found a niche market, primarily selling PC versions of UNIX running dumb
terminals in small offices. Sun Microsystems was selling lots of UNIX workstations (originally based
on BSD but merged with UNIX in SVR4) for programmers and high-end technology applications
(such as stock trading).
Other commercial UNIXes were also emerging by the 1980s. This new ownership assertion of
UNIX was beginning to take its toll on the spirit of open contributions. Lawsuits were being initi-
ated to protect UNIX source code and trademarks. In 1984, this new, restrictive UNIX gave rise to
an organization that eventually led a path to Linux: the Free Software Foundation.
NOTE
NOTE
12
Linux First Steps
Part I
