Lucent Technologies Inc believes its Inferno operating system will become the operating system for Java, but doesn’t want to make a din about it. Why? First, according to Inferno general manager Mike Skarzynski, because it has no interest in alienating any partners, either present or future; and second, because it would much rather spend its time to talking to companies which write checks rather than to the press. So what exactly are its claims for Inferno? Launched in Java’s shadow, it’s been difficult to figure out what Inferno’s role is, or will be. Until recently the two technologies have been seen as competitive, despite what Lucent says, but it’s recently become clear that the two will work more closely together, leveraging their respective strengths. Lucent has said Inferno 2.0 due in November will support the PersonalJava subset of the Java programming language which it, Nokia and WebTV helped Sun to create. If Inferno is set to rival Windows CE in screen phones and set-top boxes, the unwritten conclusion is that system software technologies derived from Java aren’t up to the job. Lucent concurs. Java is the Java virtual machine and a programming language. It’s not an operating system. You can’t solve distributed, network and security problems with a programming language, you need an operating system. And that will be Inferno, Lucent believes. Lucent doesn’t regard JavaOS as a product and says Sun has no plan to implement a production version of Personal Java this year. Lucent will. Although web phone companies Alcatel, Nortel and Samsung demonstrated their devices, and voiced support for Personal Java at a recent Sun event in New York, none has committed to use Personal Java, according to Lucent. While Alcatel and Nortel are not yet Inferno licensees either, Lucent’s clearly aiming Inferno 2.0 at them and others like them. Sun may have made Skarzynski’s job a tad more difficult yesterday by acquiring Chorus Systemes SA, the French company which has implemented JavaOS on top of a real-time, embedded kernel as Chorus/Jazz. But Skarzynski’s disagrees, claiming neither Chorus, JavaOS or Personal Java provide the distributed capabilities required to run server-based network applications. Devices using Personal Java will by their nature as skinny devices with little local storage be required to access server-based applications. Nevertheless Alcatel is using Chorus/Jazz in its webphone, and Nortel told us its webphone is 100% Java, 0% Inferno. There’s still no word of the EmbeddedJava support Inferno’s also supposed to have according to the deal Lucent and Sun cut back in the spring, but that may now be caught up in Sun’s acquisition of Chorus.
One-way affairs
Skarzynski claims every one and zero that is transmitted over the internet goes over a Lucent network device or software somewhere. Of course long-term aim would be for every one and zero to go over Inferno at some point, but in the short term is signing up as many VARs, OEMs and other Inferno partners as he can. He counts Sun, Microsoft and Silicon Graphics as publicly known partners, but wouldn’t say whether JavaOS licensee IBM, which does more than a billion dollars of business with Lucent each year, has taken as license for Inferno. Lucent claims that 44 of its 63 Inferno licensees have gone public with their agreements. Two thirds of the 63 are developing screen and web phones and consumer set top boxes – much more interactive that today’s one-way affairs, according to Skarzynski – while 23 are developing network client and network management devices. Inferno runs on Motorola PowerPC and 680×0, Intel x86 from the 386 up, ARM, StrongARM and Sun Sparc processors, with support for Hitachi SH3 and 4, Mitsubishi M32 RD and one other architecture in its plans. Lucent said it has design wins for screen phones, set top boxes and telephone switches, but wouldn’t reveal names, although Tatung Co Ltd has said it will be using Inferno for its set top boxes. The core Inferno system runs in 1Mb RAM, but to run Java, a web browser, email, and typical internet applications suite the RAM footprint grows to about 8Mb, developers say.
