Sun Microsystems Inc is to pay $10m for 2% or so of Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer Inc to seal a deal under which Sun will market the NeXTstep object-oriented operating environment as an optional overlay for its Solaris implementation of Unix for Sparc- and iAPX-86-based machines, Unigram.X sources say. The deal is also expected to involve Sun using the NeXTstep graphical user interface as the front end to its own Distributed Objects Everywhere object-oriented technology. NeXT is now keen to see the NeXTstep user interface become an industry standard and is prepared to put it into the public domain and offer it to X/Open Co Ltd as a standard – which would presumably mean that any other vendor could use any of the NeXTstep icon designs in its own interface, royalty-free, without taking full NeXTstep.
Content from our partners
