As we went to press on Friday, Unix System Laboratories Inc was understood to be asking its board to rubber stamp a decision to take a $1m minority position in the French microkernel house Chorus Systemes SA, today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X reports. The purchase will be Unix Labs’s first outside investment. Sources said the deal would cement a new strategic relationship between the pair which will see Unix System V.4 and Chorus Mix, the microkernel product, evolve in tandem. When the deal is announced, Unix Labs will stop short of saying it is adopting the French technology outright but it is believed to be a waystation on the road to such an arrangement. In the interim, Chorus will be appointed a Unix Labs value-added reseller, a brand new designation unique to the company and the two will undertake joint marketing. Unix Labs will also contribute to Chorus’s research and development and the move should help the firm in its efforts to leapfrog the Open Software Foundation’s microkernel plans and give it and its OEM customers a head start towards a commercial-grade microkernel architecture supporting real-time fault tolerance and massively parallel machines. The Chorus product, which has been implemented under System V.4 with the help of Unisys Corp, is regarded as the only commercial microkernel currently available. The Open Software Foundation, which also considered using Chrorus, opted instead to use the Mach microkernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
