Casting grave doubt on the future of any in-house repository at IBM Corp, the company has extended its existing licence for Hewlett-Packard Co’s SoftBench Framework to include non-Unix IBM systems such as OS/2 – the original licence for the software engineering tools environment covered IBM’s AIX-based development offerings only. The SoftBench Framework technology provides the underlying tool-to-tool communication that IBM used in its SDE WorkBench/6000 and SDE Integrator/6000 products, and incorporating the Framework with other IBM systems will enable IBM’s Systems Application Architecture users to participate with systems based on a Unix operating system in an open, heterogenous environment. SoftBench Framework technology, has also been licensed by Informix Software Inc, Control Data Corp, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Objectivity Inc, SAIC Inc and Taiwan’s Institute of Information Industry. SoftBench Framework is designed to provide user interface and tool communication services for the open integration of more than 70 software development tools.
