Digital Equipment Corp reports that it is planning to ship version 2.0 of OSF/1 next month, along with beta test releases of version 2.2 – its symmetric multiprocessing offering. This is expected to go into full production about three months later. The Habitat Unix System V.4 personality for OSF/1, which DEC claims is currently 99.25%-compliant with the Spec 1170 Unix application programming interface, is also scheduled for release at the end of February or the start of March. Meanwhile, DEC says it plans to start bundling free run-time licences of its implementation of the Distributed Computing Environment with OpenVMS. OSF/1 users will still have to pay $235 or 147 for each Distributed Computing Environment licence because DEC says it is not selling enough OSF/1-based systems to justify the $600,000 annual royalty fee it pays to the Open Software Foundation. The firm also intends to put NeXT Computer Inc’s NeXTstep object-oriented environment up on Alpha but not to sell it as a bundled product.
