From: kbibb@maui.qualcomm.com (Ken Bibb)
Subject: Re: Is Sun losing touch with its customers?
Organization: Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 05:20:56 GMT

In <1992Dec29.023817.18087@asd.com> scott@asd.com (Scott Barman) writes:

>In article <1992Dec27.200016.6479@ukw.uucp> lupe@ukw.uucp (Lupe Christoph) writes:
>>When Sun announced they would "join the crowd" this was generally
>>hailed as a good decision. But this was when nobody had the next
>>release around the corner, and nobody was forced to face the consequences.
>>
>>Where were you BSD advocates at the time this decision was made? Nobody
>>spoke up for BSD at the time!

>When Sun announce they would "join the crowd" almost five years ago,
>there was no "crowd." At that time Sun also told us that we should not
>worry, they will provide an upgrade path and that their valued customers
>would be taken care of.  

They did (and do) follow this philsophy--they provided that path via
the sysv stuff that you complain about below.  If you talked to their SE's
they've been saying "prepare!  svr4 is around the corner!"  but you didn't
listen...


>Then Sun announced they are almost ready and puts out the svmt. When it
>is finally loaded, you realize that svmt is nothing more than a
>glorified lint!  What's worse is that those of us who have used X
>Windows since the dawn of time (OK, so it has only been since X Version
>10) have decided to stay with MIT's X11 and away from Sun's perpertually
>buggy OpenWindows with their slow response in fixing the bugs (and MIT's
>X11 was free, I remember having to pay for an initial OW release).  This
>svmt runs under Sun's XView (SunView for X without intrinsics support)
>and you had to figure out how to run it to a tty to get around their
>near useless GUI.  Some tool!

XView is not "SunView for X".  It is an X11 toolkit.  It's very easy
to use and (according to the unscientific polls here) the most popular
development toolkit for X on Suns.  It sounds like you just didn't
know how to run the app on your system (a path set wrong, for example).
Another possibility might have to do with your window manager being
incorrectly set up.


>I mentioned OpenWindows above.  In the middle of all this, Sun decides
>that since almost nobody (except SGI) embraced NeWS, they were going to
>join the world and give their customers X.  Their initial offerings of
>OpenWindows tried to make everyone happy, including their SunView users.
>Instead of trying to move on (which OW3 seems to have done it close to

OW3 has been around for a year or so--you can dump the sunview stuff if
you don't like it with the much mentioned -nosunview option.

>right), they have held on to their past alienating those who have chosen
>X Windows as their standard (most of the industry).  Even today, Sun is
>making "quiet" noises of dropping NeWS and moving twoards intrinsics-based 
>interfaces.  [Personal opinion: ever notice how Sun follows the standard
>for everything but when they start talking about GUIs, they call
>themselves the first (true) but don't dive into what they are doing
>today beyond saying "We're X11 compatible?  It's about time Sun joined
>the rest of us!]

X was developed by DEC.  NeWS was developed by Sun when they had a falling
out with Adobe (what they *really* wanted was Display PostScript which they
will be replacing NeWS with).  The *idea* of NeWS was always superior to
Dec's X.  It was just a pain to debug...  Btw, Sun has been "X11 compatible"
for a while--you make it sound like they're doing it as part of the
Solaris 2.x thing.


>So they are later and getting later.  Still, there is this large
>investment in 4.1.* with no good upgrade path and they keep pushing back

How do you define "good upgrade path"?  I think they've provided a "good"
upgrade path.  It isn't fantastic, but it's there.  Just like their
Sunview upgrade path was there in the early days of OpenWindows...

>the release date (yes, I did get my Solaris 2.1 CDs last week).  In the
>mean time, those of us on limited budgets have been producing software

You mean a free GNU compiler will break your budget?

>with their distributed C Compiler.  After much infighting, Sun decides
>to drop it from their system.  Why?  They claim it is no longer needed
>and those who need it will buy it.  This is what they do in the pee cee
>industry, right?  Well the cost of the hardware and software is
>different.  They remove what many of us consider a vital part of their
>distribution, raise the price of it, and tell us they did it because
>Billy down the block does it.  Someone forgot to tell Scotty that if we
>wanted to put up with Billy's antics, we would not have Suns on our
>desks.

>So you see, it wasn't perceived to be a problem at that time.  If Sun
>stuck to their word and made this as painless as they "promised" we
>would not be screeming.  But they dragged their feet and hit us with a
>lot of interim stuff that is not on any real upgrade path.  Now they are

It looked like it was on an upgrade path to me...

>telling us to conform or (proverbially) to hell with you.  Many of use
>can't stop and conform.  We need help and time.  Help Sun promised from

Yeah, it does sound like you need help :)

>the beginning and time because they forgot that they told us not to
>worry.

>Personal Observation: It's interesting how the promise of NT says it
>will run Windows 3 AND DOS applications but Solaris 2 will not run

Beta testers have stated that NT will only run "well behaved" Windows
and DOS programs.  Sun has stated that "well behaved" SunOS <5.0 programs
will be relatively painless to port.  Sounds about even to me...

>statically linked 4.1.* a.outs and may not run other applications that
>use unsupported features in their bsd-compatibility mode (e.g., light
>weight processes).

Do you understand how linking works?  ABIs?  If so, why complain about
statically linked programs?  Either this or the system wouldn't be
SVr4 compliant!

-- 
Ken Bibb                "he heard the snow falling faintly through the
kbibb@qualcomm.com	 universe and faintly falling, like the descent of
jester@crash.cts.com     their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
				--"The Dead", James Joyce

Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.misc