The industry’s itch to know how Sun Microsystems Inc will play the Unix System V.4 card is going to be scratched later this week when Sun starts unveiling its operating system strategy. As we understand it at this point, Sun is going for a phased migration from SunOS to System V.4 that will take some time to complete. Its October 18 statement of direction is expected to be geared to the independent software vendor community, particularly those with product already in the Sun catalogue, encouraging them to move over. It also has to get its in-house software, reportedly representing another 2,000 packages, converted before it has anything to say to the end-user. At some point down the road, SunOS will die, but then Sun-specific bells and whistles will be added to System V.4. Solbourne Computer Inc, the only outside Sparc vendor to license SunOS direct from Sun rather than through Interactive Systems Corp, said it was not anticipating being able to offer customers V.4 for at least a year.
