[TUHS] Re: ANSI (C) vs IEEE (POSIX) Standards Body Selection

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

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I'll add that POSIX, as we know it today (and really since at least 2000)
is a collaboration between The Open Group, IEEE Std 1003.1-XXXX and ISO/IEC
9945:YYYY (collectively known as the Austin Group, though why "Austin" I
cannot say).

So these days, it's standardized by "both" IEEE and ANSI (in the form of
ISO, of which ANSI is effectively a member).

Warner

On Wed, Jun 26, 2024 at 3:20 PM Alan Coopersmith via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>
wrote:

> On 6/26/24 13:29, Marc Rochkind wrote:
> > The standards effort I was involved in was part of the now-forgotten (I
> hope)
> > GUI Wars, in which a bunch of workstation makers (I remember DEC, HP,
> and IBM,
> > among others) supporting an X Window System GUI toolkit called Motif
> battled Sun
> > and AT&T who pushed OpenLook. OpenLook was about 50 times more elegant,
> but
> > Motif won the day. It came from OSF, the Open Systems Foundation, which
> was
> > easily the most arrogant organization I ever dealt with. I think they
> were
> > disbanded as a result of a lawsuit involving restraint of trade, or
> monopolistic
> > behavior, or a cartel, or something along those lines.
>
> OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group, though the lawsuit you
> mention
> is described in the History section of
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation .
>
> > I think the
> > Motif folks managed at one point to get their own standards committee. I
> know
> > that our effort fizzled. I don't know if there ever was a Motif standard.
>
> After the merger, Motif was included, along with CDE and the X Window
> System,
> as part of The Open Group's "Unix 98 Workstation" standard.  Later versions
> of the Unix standards dropped the GUI components altogether.
>
> > Motif, like X, was easily used by anyone who was an MIT CS grad student.
> > OpenLook might have been used by Sun Workstation programmers, but I
> don't know
> > if it ever appeared on any other system.
>
> At least the Xview library and olvm window manager were released as open
> source,
> and were available on some early Linux distros.  Some other applications
> are
> still available from either https://www.darwinsys.com/olcd/ or
> https://github.com/IanDarwin/OpenLookCDROM .
>

I'm saddened that I was never able to get Object Interface (OI) sources
released,
since it implemented both Motif and OpenLook (2d and 3d) in C++. and UIB
(User Interface Builder).
But instead we were purchased by too many companies that later just
abandoned everything.
It was my little hedge against the Unix Wars, and porting it to all the
Unixes showed me
both how close everything was, and how annoyingly different things were. I
kinda had my
own 'portability library' that I'd conditionally compile in things for the
outlier Unix systems of
the day (usually HP/UX and AIX, though IRIX was oddly both more advanced
and missing
bits).

Warner


> --
>          -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith@oracle.com
>           Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris
>
>

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