Section 2. Sun and standardization wars

Abstract

m Before it initiated the SMI PAS documentation, SMI participated in four major standardization activities—UNIX standardization, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) wars, IEEE 1754 activities, and the Windows Application Programming Interface (APIW) effort. In all of these activities Sun was a major protagonist, battling with or against major players in the IT industry. SMI’s experiences with its standardization initiatives provide a basis for understanding SMI’s dealings with the PAS, and why the PAS represents one organization’s response to the difficulties encountered in the formal (and informal) standardization process. This section of StandardView looks briefly at these four activities and tries to draw a somewhat sympathetic picture of the mindset of SMI management as they struggled with the need to standardize Java. significant player in much of SMI’s standardization history was the Open Software Foundation (OSF). OSF was created to, among other things, counter the Sun–AT&T alliance on SVR4 UNIX. In 1987 and 1988, Sun abandoned its BSD UNIX base and aligned with AT&T’s System 5, Release 4, agreeing to AT&T licensing terms and conditions. Other major vendors, including Digital, found AT&T’s proposed royalty scheme not in their business interests, and opted instead to create their own UNIX-like system, merging the best of BSD, SVR4, and CMU’s Mach systems. To create this software, HP, Dec, and IBM formed the OSF in 1988, with the creation of a competing and “open” operating system, OSF1, as one of its goals. Sun and AT&T immediately responded with the creation of UNIX International (UI), a consortium intended to provide “open development of the real UNIX,” based on SVR4. The UI consortium was to provide an independent arena for the future development of UNIX, away from AT&T’s control. The UNIX Consortia battles caused the spilling of innumerable gallons of printers ink, but did little to make the world safe for UNIX or OSF1. Both sides spent tremendous amounts of money proving that they, and not their competition, were the true “open system” (see the earlier section on “open systems”). This battle continued until 1994. The UNIX battles spawned other arguments, the most notorious the now largely forgotten Graphical User Interface (GUI) war. The war had dual—and innocent—beginnings. The first part of the story unfolds at MIT, where the X Window System was created in the mid-1980s. DEC, IBM, and HP all participated in furthering the X Window Systems technology, and eventually MIT realized that it had a possible gold mine. To capitalize on its relationship with its sponsors, MIT formed (in 1988) a memberfunded consortium (the MIT X Consortium, renamed the X Consortium in 1993). Because the MIT X Consortium was limited in its scope (by design), the three major participants asked their newly created consortium to create a viable windowing scheme using X technology around which they (the big three vendors) could coalesce. The idea was to provide both an API and GUI, or merely the Section 2. Sun and Standardization Wars