With Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Open Desktop dead in the water as an operating system for the Advanced Computing Environment initiative architecture – it still exists as a set of add-ons for Unix on Intel Corp iAPX-86-based machines, the prospects for another operating system designed by committee, the Open Software Foundation’s OSF/1, are now looking decidedly lacklustre. Electronic News has been doing the rounds of the Foundation sponsors and finds that only Digital Equipment Corp of the US and European sponsors is hanging its hat on OSF/1 for its flagship Unix machines. IBM Corp has launched a version of OSF/1, but only in the ultra low-volume mainframe version of AIX, but Groupe Bull SA is quite happy to add bits of Foundation technology to its Berkeley Unix brought up to Unix System V.3.2 level, and Hewlett-Packard Co is taking the same tack with HP-UX. IBM’s AIX/6000 for the RS/6000 is still firmly System V.3-based, and while the company says it does plan to use the OSF/1 kernel over time, that clearly now means this year, next year, sometime, maybe never. Hewlett-Packard and IBM are both very interested in the microkernel planned by the Software Foundation, but that is two years away, which suggests that if applications developers do not start converting their applications to run under OSF/1 soon, for commercial reasons, all the sponsors currently at the V.3.2 level look likely to decide to wait for the microkernel and then implement their existing environments over it. Even DEC may find that it may need to hang on to its V.3.2-level Ultrix rather longer than it intended: it says that so far about 500 of the 3,000 Ultrix applications are being converted for OSF/1, which doesn’t sound like unbounded enthusiasm on the part of the industry. Hitachi Ltd has OSF/1 out in Japan, but its role in computers is now starting to appear strained.
