Although everyone and his dog had already made the assumption, it’s now official, OSF/1 is dead, today’s Unigram.X reports. Speaking at the Open Software Foundation’s members meeting in Boston last week, president and chief executive David Tory formally announced the demise of the planned Mach microkernel-based version of the Unix operating system. OSF/1 is now in its final release and there will be no more work on the core, he said. The Foundation instead will concentrate on layering technologies in future. It was not really a surprise. Digital Equipment Corp has been the only real fan of OSF/1 and since it announced that it would encourage its OpenVMS users to switch to Window NT, the writing has been more clearly on the wall. The Foundation will henceforth focus its system software development work on the Mach MK6 and MK7 kernels. Dropping OSF/1 will ease some of the Software Foundation’s political difficulties as it stops competing with its members in the operating system market.
