This month, sometime before America’s Labor Day on September 6, at an undetermined location, an armistice will be declared in the Unix Wars, and the entire industry will get behind a unified Unix. At least that’s the plan, notes today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X. Its realisation depends on getting and keeping everybody together long enough to pull it off. As a starting point, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, schismatics since the founding of the Open Software Foundation back in 1988, are intending to reunite with their orthodox Unix System V.4 brothers in a massive outpouring of support for an agreed set of common application programming interfaces that has elements of System V.4.0 as its base and may embrace far more than the mere kernel. The capitulation of IBM and Hewlett, while high-profile, is viewed as only the tip of a iceberg extending down through the entire industry with no one excluded, except perhaps for Microsoft Corp. Reunification has apparently been achieved under the auspices of the Common Open Software Environment, which has been driven largely by Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc with some help from Novell Inc and the Santa Cruz Operation Inc. However it may not be billed as a COSE event. It is expected to be memorialised in a huge industry announcement, attended by major independent software vendors, equivalent to the precedent-setting photo opportunity presented the day the Open Software Foundation was launched five years ago. Santa Cruz is expected to use this as an opportunity to migrate to System V.4. The pain of companies such as Hewlett and IBM in making the adjustments is all in the future, and a roadmap with milestones should be detailed. Neither Hewlett nor IBM is expected to abandon its existing version of Unix, HP-UX and AIX respectively, though some changes are likely. Rather they may adopt a route similar to the one taken by Digital Equipment Corp in supporting a System V.4 personality under their current implementations. Exactly how they will do what they are contemplating doing is said to be still not settled. DEC, which came to COSE late in the game and has been the Software Foundation’s most ardent supporter, will also probably lend its backing to the unification move. Some time ago, IBM isolated the elements common to key Unix variants, some 200 items, application programming interfaces and system calls, and this may form the basis of the unification work.
