Unix International Inc expects to publish its overview of distributed computing come September or October. It has had a 43-member work group, chaired by Locus Computing and Sun Microsystems, working on the issues for a couple of months and Unix International’s project manager Tom Bishop now figures that 20% of the long-term solutions it recommends will be lifted from Plan 9, the culturally compatible successor to Unix that Unix developers over at Bell Laboratories have been writing for the last two to three years (CI No 1,473). Plan 9 assumes the future of Unix is networking and so its impact on Unix International’s distributed computing statement will be no surprise. Plan 9, however, is a lab animal – not a commercial development – and its originators are understandably biased towards decentralised peer-to-peer environments rather than the client-server model that is selling in the market today. For that reason, Plan 9 will probably form the basis of only 10% of the work group’s immediate distributed solutions, Bishop said, looking to it for such items as improved applications support in homogeneous situations. Unix International’s other near-term objectives include Kerberos, X400, X500 and an improved Remote Procedure Call mechanism. Unlike the Open Software Foundation, the Unix International team prefers a modular approach to the Remote Procedure Call issue and is believed to be giving its blessings to the negotiations understood to be going on between AT&T Unix System Labs and Netwise for the acquisition of the latter’s Remote Procedure Call technology. A deal between the two which was due to be announced this week has been put back until September, sources say.
