Amongst the announcements at Uniforum/DC this month was the signing up of six more members by the Open Software Foundation the Alternative Unix club now has around 25 members, but it hasn’t yet got the go-ahead to reveal all of them. Those that have let on include Adobe Systems (which revealed its membership a few weeks back), Altos Computer Systems, The Mitre Corporation, Stratus Computer Inc, Tecsiel SpA, and Toshiba America Inc (Advanced Systems). Among the less familiar names are Mitre Corp, a non-profitmaking system engineering firm – it pays only $5,000 rather than the full $25,000 Foundation membership fee which is working on technical developments for US government agencies, including the Department of Defense; and the Italian Tecsiel SpA, part of the state-owned IRI-Finsiel Group, which is a research corporation developing software technology in the fields of artificial intelligence, computer networks and system software. The Advanced Systems Division of Toshiba America markets the company’s T5100 Unix portable – but Toshiba seems eager to keep a foot in both camps, as it is also working with Sun Microsystems on a SPARC-based laptop. Meanwhile, Stratus Computer took the opportunity of the announcement to talk officially for the first time about its own future plans for a fault-tolerant native implementation of Unix for its XA2000 Continuous Processing Systems (CI No 985).
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