IBM Corp’s AIX Unix won’t be abandoned with the arrival of the company’s planned Workplace OS, but it might become a different beast. The microkernel, object-oriented Workplace OS on which IBM is setting much store, will run AIX, Windows, MS-DOS, native OS/2 and Macintosh applications and is set to supersede AIX in some regards, initially on client and low-end systems. Although there is an effort to see if it will be possible to converge AIX and Workplace OS in a mickrokernel release – and any decision on that is at least a year out – AIX will continue as an operating system for servers for the foreseeable future, according to director of RISC Systems Software, Donna Van Fleet. Furthermore, because IBM isn’t so dependent on Novell Inc’s Unix code as Sun Microsystems Inc was, there is no chance IBM would be prepared or required to pay as much as Sun’s $82.5m to buy a source licence, she says.
