The news that Tata Consultancy Services has showed up as the twelfth investor in Unix System Laboratories Inc (CI No 1,890) only now able to complete the transaction because the Indian government makes it so hard for nationals to invest hard currency overseas – leaves one more Unix co-owner, reportedly in a similar fix, still behind the curtain: it’s thought to be a South Korean outfit and that it will declare itself in June. The others are Amdahl Corp, Motorola Inc, Novell Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, ICL Plc, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Fujitsu Ltd, NEC Corp, Oki Electric Industry Co, Toshiba Corp, the Institute for Information Industry in Taiwan and of course – still by far the largest shareholder, AT&T Co. Meanwhile, Unix Labs has taken on another board member, Scott Morton, a strategic planning specialist and Jay W Forrester Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. Meanwhile, Unix Labs has discovered that the name Destiny is trademarked by another software company, so it now looks as if it will have to call its desktop Unix operating system something else.
