AT&T Co may soon reach a compromise on some common form of Unix with the Open Software Foundation alternative Unix club, AT&T chairman Robert Allen told securities analysts in Boston last week. He said that serious, open discussions were going on with several of the leading corporations in the Foundation, and that he was hopeful that agreement would emerge soon. The Foundation is committed to basing its operating system on release 3 of IBM’s AIX, which is due out in 10 months. The current AIX release is based on Unix System V.2 with Berkeley extensions, but the new version will be a complete rewrite, eliminating use of the Virtual Resource Manager kernel from the RT Personal Computer. The current AT&T release is V.3, which makes several extensions, including Remote File Sharing mandatory, but the intention is that the standard base should be the upcoming V.4 release on which Sun Microsystems is doing much of the work. The Foundation is adamant that its own standard will be based on AIX, and it seems no rapprochement will be possible unless AT&T backtracks to V.3 and drops the requirement that licensees take RFS and Streams with it.
