Proprietary UNIX systems again (was: "Standard" Unix utilities)

[Jon maddog Hall]

Tom,

>Why didn't I see rename?  Aha. rename is a linuxism.  Or GNUism.  It's on
>linux.  It's on Cygwin.  It's not on Solaris.  It's not on Irix.

>I don't have a BSD system to test, but it might be on that.
>I bet it's not on HP-UX or AIX.

>This is why many of us have reinvented the wheel so many times and keep
>things in our ~/bin :-(

>You'll find the same things with unix2dos/dos2unix, pkill, killall, df
>(different options!), anything that looks at disk partitions, etc.

>Thankfully the Unix world has converged a bit.  People with OSS systems
>tended to put tools they needed into the standard distributions and they got
>propaged.  The commercial OS vendors started to follow suit with perl, bash,
>tcsh.  df in Solaris 10 finally has -h (does HP-UX 12.x have -k now?)

>I think we'll see further merging with OpenSolaris.

This is a factor of closed source, proprietary Unix systems.  The rationale
goes like this:

Engineer: "Let's add some of these cool new commands!"

Product Manager (who usually uses Windows to do their work):

"Who will do the testing of them?  Who will package them?  Won't this increase
the amount of disk space we need on the disk?  Who wants them?  How much will
they pay for them?  How many calls will we get at the support center on this
new command?  Will we have to increase our support costs?  That will make us
uncompetitive!  Are there any patents against this code?  Who wrote it?  Where
did it come from? What engineer will be the 'Designated Responsible Individual'
(DRI) for the command?  Isn't that command copyrighted by Sun [or IBM, or HP,
or DEC]?" and on, and on, and on.  By the time the PM gets finished, the
engineer (who really knows what the customer wants) is slinking away, tail
between his legs.

Between System III and System V was "System IV", which few people outside of
AT&T ever saw.  System IV had lots of neat commands, most of which were
stripped from System V because there was no one to raise their hand to "support"
the command.

This are some of the reasons that we had to build and ship a lot of "cool"
commands on our "good-stuff" disk as a separate "thing", to let people
know that if it was on the "good-stuff" disk we were not taking responsibility
for it.  Of course "good-stuff" was what a lot of people wanted.

Command line code is not "sexy".  Most managers never see it, nor do they
appreciate what it does.  But let a single GUI crappy calendar show up, and
they are gaga.  [Not so much anymore, since even the managers are getting wise
to "eye candy".]

Just another reason to love FOSS.  If "rename" is missing from your favorite
distribution of proprietary software, there is the source code...go at it.

If it is missing from your favorite distribution of FOSS, and can not be found
in a package ready for your system on the net, or easily built for your system
from sources on the net, then maybe you are using the wrong distribution.

Regards,

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

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