Is DEC giving up Ultrix?

[Marcus J. Ranum]

katcher at netcom.netcom.COM (Jeff Katcher) writes:
>I have been considering purchasing a new DECstation 5000/120, but am holding
>back due to the stories in the trade rags about DEC handing over Ultrix to
>SCO.  What is the truth?

	As you also probably know from the trade rags, DEC is planning on
slowly and smoothly transitioning the ULTRIX kernel base to OSF/1, which
is a modified mach based kernel. This is the operating system that was
recently released as an advanced developer's kit from DEC, and is the
basic OSF offering. As part of the ACE initiative, DEC is going to be
giving the MIPS reference port of OSF/1 to SCO, who will market it for the
ACE platforms. For a lot of reasons, SCO wants to call it SCO, rather
than OSF/1, or DEC's port of OSF/1, but it *will* be the basic OSF/1
offering. No doubt everyone will be struggling and competing (as they
do now) to "add value" to that basic offering.

	This doesn't mean that we are pitching ULTRIX - we were planning
to transition ULTRIX to an OSF/1 base anyhow - so our strategy stays the
same there - we're not out of the operating system business, since we'll
still (presumably) be writing device drivers and whatnot.

	I hope this clears things up some - if you need a more definitive
answer, ask your DEC salescritter to get someone who understands ACE and
what it's all about to come chat with you.

mjr.