The Open Software Foundation put on a very bullish face at last month’s preview of its OSF/1 Unix variant (CI No 1,393), claiming that membership, currently standing at 185, was growing at 10 organisations a month: in Japan, six new members signed up last month, it said, of which two – Nippon Kokan KK and Keio University – announced their membership at the conference; no-one will dispute another claim, that a large number of Unix International Inc members have signed for OSF/Motif licences; a major theme of the announcement was the superior technical features of OSF/1compared with the technical complexity spagetti code, old-fashioned architecture – of System V.4; the OSF/1 architecture will enable multiple operating systems to run on top of the Mach-based micro-kernel, thus providing backwards binary compatibility essential when a vendor is migrating users to OSF/1 from a proprietary operating environment; it also disputes any suggestion that Hitachi Ltd is thinking of withdrawing from the Foundation (CI No 1,394) and pointed to a statement by Hitachi enclosed with the press kit, in which it supports the delivery of the OSF Snapshot in January this year, OSF/Motif, and incorporation of Mach into OSF/1; Hitachi has established a facility near Boston and has been working with the OSF Portability Lab.
