Gossip swirls around the Open Software Foundation over OSF/1’s chances of survival
It has been clear for some time that Unix System Laboratories Inc and Unix International have triumphed in the Unix Wars with System V.4, and that the Open Software Foundation has been relegated to the role of coming up with useful add-ons to Unix while just a handful of companies maintain their commitment to the original dream – a Unix-compatible operating system with no code licensed from Unix Labs in it. At the same time, with the cash crisis at the SQL Access Group, it is becoming clear that in these straitened times, many companies simply cannot afford the subventions needed to keep all the worthy industry bodies born in a wild flush of enthusiasm in the late 1980s in the manner to which they have become accustomed, however worthy their aims, and the Open Software Foundation is not immune from these chilling forces. Gossip is now circulating that OSF/1, the operating system conceived in spite and anger, may miscarry. Siemens AG defected long ago, taking Nixdorf Computer AG with it, Groupe Bull SA will end up following whatever IBM Corp does, Hewlett-Packard Co snapped up Apollo Computer Inc and is now wavering, and only Digital Equipment Corp remains wholehearted, leaving the one Japanese sponsor, Hitachi Ltd, looking on in hurt bewilderment. Claims are being made that OSF/1’s future is currently under debate in a round robin of meetings and phone calls among the founders and staff of the Open Software Foundation and that no decision has been reached. The gossips say the issue is whether the Foundation, under pressure to become self-sustaining, should continue to spend its resources on further development or focus its energies on its more innovative software Distributed Computing Environment, Distributed Management Environment and Motif. OSF/1 could be farmed out or forgotten. However a Digital Equipment Corp middle manager said last week that OSF/1’s life is not in jeopardy and that the real issue being debated is whether there’s a smarter way to do the engineering – whether the Software Foundation should subcontract it or hire additional engineers.
DEC: Ultrix comeback, MIPStations miss out – OSF/1 now for the Alpha only
A child of many fathers, OSF/1 is still practically an orphan. Only DEC has adopted it and was rumoured to be lobbying for its continued development within the framework of the consortium. Yet even DEC, which has spent a small fortune debugging and implementing it, has loosened its bear hug. Once scheduled to run on its MIPStations, then on both its MIPS and Alpha machines, OSF/1 has now been scrapped as far as the MIPS boxes go and declared an Alpha-only environment. In the meantime, DEC has restarted its Ultrix development. DEC says that OSF/1-on-Alpha is now its primary environment and applications target and that customers are telling it the transition would be made more easily from MIPS R4000-based boxes running Ultrix than running OSF/1. Then only the hardware would change; not both hardware and software. DEC claims that its MIPS DECstation and DECsystems machines could eventually run OSF/1. But realistically speaking, barring overwhelming customer demand, Alpha will overtake MIPS Computer’s R-series RISCs long before that happens.
Hewlett: kernel is a don’t care issue
Hewlett-Packard Co is also fonder of its own proprietary iteration of Unix, HP-UX, than OSF/1 and is talking seriously of staying with that, at least until more advanced mic rokernel work becomes available. On the other hand, rumours, both printed and whispered, that Hewlett is getting ready to bolt to the System V.4 camp, perhaps for the desktop with Destiny, are at best premature. For starters, Hewlett-Packard General Systems Division general manager Bernard Guidon, referring to Destiny, indicated that Hewlett was concerned about consistency in its operating system offerings. Chief executive John Young told a meeting of analysts last week that Hewlett-Packard had been looking at both the Unix Labs and the Open Software Foundation kernel
s, but had no plans in place to license Unix Labs technology. He did say, however, that one of Hewlett-Packard’s Precision Architecture RISC partners would be doing an implementation. Young later told our sister paper Unigram that technology marches on, and the kernel has become a don’t care issue, gone away and moved to higher layers. Hewlett-Packard was, he said, very interested in the market for desktop Unix, the basis being its Visual User Environment product.
IBM: common microkernel for AIX, OS/2
Both Hewlett-Packard and IBM Corp are interested in the Open Software Foundation’s microkernel developments. Hewlett-Packard’s Guidon, however, maintains that this is a completely separate issue from the one posed by OSF/1 and much further down the road. In a move reminiscent of what Microsoft Corp is doing with NT and Unix Labs with Destiny, IBM has said recently that it is dividing both AIX and OS/2 into client and server versions and wants them to share as much infrastructure as possible. Ultimately that would mean a common kernel, apparently a Mach microkernel. Meanwhile, the Open Software Foundation itself has denied in writing that OSF/1 will be de-emphasised out of existence. Its statement reads As of May 8 1992, the Open Software Foundation is still unequivocally committed to OSF/1 and intends to aggressively pursue its on-going development and adoption in the marketplace. It also said it has a plan to converge OSF/1 and OSF/l MK, its planned microkernel, into a single microkernel-based next generation OSF/1, presumably in keeping with prior intentions. – Maureen O’Gara
