In informal discussions last week, Santa Cruz Operation Inc observed that the Advanced Computing Environment was just a figment of the ACE consortium’s imagination. It admits it lost time and money on the diversion, but believes the experience taught it some important lessons. Santa Cruz is currently looking at ways of raising more capital – that it may go public to find it is no secret. On the product front – and picking up on some of the work it did for ACE – the company says an Intel Corp P5-specific Santa Cruz Unix kernel is a possibility. And our sister paper Unigram’s generally reliable sources reiterated their claims that Unix System Laboratories Inc did indeed talk to the Santa Cruz Operation about acquisition, and now add that Unix Labs can’t possibly decide what to do about Santa Cruz until after it knows whether Unix Labs itself is going public, going for another investment round or going to get acquired. And Unix Labs and Santa Cruz are said to have worked through a lot of their emotional disparity if not their pricing differences over this business of Santa Cruz adopting System V.4. Now Computer Reseller News contributes some technical concerns bedevilling Santa Cruz over System V.4.2: it seems that Santa Cruz is bothered by the fact that the kernel is split into three separate trees, desktop, enhanced security and multiprocessor support. It is more partial to what the paper calls System V.4.3 when it all gets integrated sometime next summer.
