DEC and IBM have now signed agreements with the Open Software Foundation, allowing them to send engineers to the Foundation’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters to begin work on implementing OSF/1 for their hardware. As well as technical help from the Foundation engineers, the two will get weekly releases of the OSF/1 code as opposed to the bi-monthly updates they have been receiving until now. Groupe Bull, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Intel, Intergraph and Siemens-Nixdorf have already signed the agreement – the Foundation sponsor member NV Philips is the ominous omission. Up to 80% of the required conversion could be completed by the time the operating system is released, claims the Foundation, and space remains for two or three more teams of engineers at the Portability Lab.
