IBM Corp’s Austin operations, or at least some faction there, is seriously interested in becoming a system software supplier – a viable alternative to Microsoft Corp and Unix System Laboratories – and sees remarketing the Mach 3 kernel from Carnegie Mellon University as the way to do it, according to a report out of an Open Software Foundation Research Institute meeting in Boston the week before last. Of course it still has to sell the idea to management, comments Unigram, which says its source thinks that Austin is still 24 months from a product, but the notion could be IBM’s answer to Microsoft’s NT. Austin would apparently give Mach, said to be free of Unix Labs-AT&T code, multiple personalities like OS/2 or OSF/1. Whether the Open Software Foundation Research Institute would be a technology source for the Austin effort is still unclear.
