Aiming to refute the widespread impression that OSF/1 has been somewhat halfheartedly supported by its sponsor companies, the Open Software Foundation says it now has 100 source code licensees for OSF/1, and that 250,000 binaries have been shipped. The operating system, it says, now contributes significant revenues to its bottom line, and tops revenues generated by the Motif graphical user interface or DCE Distributed Computing Environment tool set. Source licensees include 12 OEM customers: IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co are the big three, with Compagnie des Machines Bull SA subscribing through IBM and Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA through DEC, while Convex Computer Corp, Intel Corp, Tandem Computers Inc and Kendall Square Research Inc are licensees. Hitachi Ltd, Sumitomo Co and Omrom Corp make up the Japanese contingent – although Hitachi is the only one currently shipping product on its mainframes. While only DEC offers a full implementation of OSF/1 Release 1.2, all the others pay full royalties to the Foundation on each copy they ship – they would apparently do so even if they used a single semi-colon of OSF/1 code, according to Joseph Maloney, OSF/1 Business Area Manager. IBM takes the commands and libraries (which it in any case originated) on AIX 3.2 and higher, while Hewlett-Packard takes streams and networking for HP-UX. The rest of the 100 source code takers are end-users with specialist, complex applications such as TRW Inc, GTE Corp, CAE Electronics Ltd, and Tele Finland. There are now around 3,000 OSF/1 applications out there, although these are spread among the various architectures – a catalogue is apparently on its way. Maloney said OSF/1 was now within two interfaces of conformance with the COSE Spec 1170 interface, a process that he expected to be complete any day now. The Foundation now claims over 400 members, having seen a 20% increase in membership over the last three months.
