IBM Corp and Hitachi Ltd may be at daggers drawn over 370 architecture mainframes, but both companies see an interest in derailing the bandwaggon running for a single Unix standard IBM because it puts its vast proprietary revenues in jeopardy, Hitachi because its closest rival, Fujitsu Ltd, is in the original and best Unix International camp, and in Japan, the two have agreed to join forces on development of applications for the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1 version of Unix. The two will initially second engineers to a joint project to convert Hitachi’s Software Engineering Workbench development tools to run under OSF/1: the Workbench is designed for developing financial management and marketing administration applications, and the resulting version will be used and marketed by both companies. IBM Japan told told Reuter that the agreement was a first step towards a broader collaboration on Unix planned between the two companies.
