Motorola 88000 RISC fan club 88/Open is putting its back into Unix International’s newly unveiled independent software vendor recruiting effort to the tune of some $7m worth of free hardware, software, documentation and test suites pledged by its members. 88/Open’s is the largest single investment Unix International has garnered for its new programme so far. However, Unix International president Peter Cunningham estimates that initial contributions from all the sources he has tapped to date for the first phase of the programme total in the neighbourhood of $35m. The object of the programme, which Unix International rolled out in New York last week backed by supporters like Oracle and X/Open, is to double the number of applications running under Unix in the next two years. Unix International has developed a hit list of key applications, selected according to vertical market and geography, that it is particularly anxious to see converted. It is those companies Unix International will try to attract to the seminars it will be running later this year in Europe and the US. 88/Open, on the other hand, is specifically targeting MSDOS houses, offering the first 500 independent software vendors that qualify a free package that includes a 25MHz 88000 AT add-in board, Data General AViiON, Motorola Delta server or Opus co-processor board, Diab Data C compiler, certification test suite and AT&T operating system, valued at $14,000 each, for conversion to AT&T’s System V Release 4. Since Motorola and 88//Open have their eye on the shrink-wrapped mass market, 88/Open has also gone to Softsel/Microamerica for an agreement for the distributor to handle 88/Open-certified binary-compatible software.
