IBM Corp has made the second release of ESA/MVS OpenEdition generally available. While the initial version of ‘open’ MVS was positioned as a separate product line, OpenEdition Release 2 is a set of services integrated into mainstream MVS/ESA SP Version 5.1. It includes internationalised versions of the Posix 1003.1 and 1003.2 interfaces from Mortice Kern Systems Ltd of Waterloo, Ontario, a C run-time library, support for Restructured Extended Executor Language program execution direct from the shell, Network File System Server support and integrated Sockets support for TCP/IP. Distributed Computing Environment Base Services support, currently in beta test, will be shipped later this year, probably in December, along with Distributed Computing Environment Application Servers for CICS and IMS. These will enable IBM transaction processing subsystems to be used as servers interfacing to user-written clients. IBM spokesman Jim Porell said IBM hoped to be able to license the Unix trademark from X/Open Co Ltd sometime next year for MVS, once it has achieved the X/Open Portability Guide 4 and Spec 1170 specifications – assuming that all the outstanding copyright issues, including Microsoft Corp’s rights to the name can be resolved by then. Other future plans include object-oriented support via IBM’s System Object Model, Network File System Client support, and parallel and shared file systems support. OpenEdition applications, currently mostly programming tools, include software from Abraxas International Inc, Candle Corp, Computer Associates International Inc, Legent Corp, Science Applications International Corp, Sapiens International Corp NV, Software AG, Sterling Software Inc and Sybase Inc. IBM is hoping that end-user applications will begin supporting the new services over the coming year. IBM’s aim is to enable System 390 mainframes to operate as a peer, not just a data centre, in new system installations.
