Caldera International will not try to merge the Unix and Linux
operating systems, following its purchase of the Unix and services
arms of the Santa Cruz Operation earlier this year.
The message was made plain to visitors to this week's Caldera Forum
after industry watchers had raised the prospect of the company
forcing a shotgun wedding between the two operating systems.
However, Caldera will try and improve uniformity between the
operating systems to enable better use of the technology.
"We are not going to try and smash together Linux and Unix in a
single operating system," said Drew Spencer, Caldera's chief
technology officer.
"What we want is consistency [between Linux and Unix]. We want
consistent management, consistent configuration, consistent
services and a common development environment," he stated.
As its first step, the company has announced Vizier, an
infrastructure platform solution to enable users to integrate their
operating systems on one platform.
Ransom Love, the Caldera president and chief executive officer,
said that Vizier would enable the delivery of much-simplified
web-enabled platforms for customisable solutions, as well as
providing cost savings for itself and independent solutions
vendors.
"We [now] have three different kernels, with different
capabilities, pitched at different markets," Love said. "Why would
we do three different web services, for example? It makes no sense.
If we focus on services as a common layer we get economies of
scale. It's pragmatic and our customers get a common platform."
The company is to hone its focus on Web services. Spencer said
Caldera was keen to working with Microsoft's .Net, but added:
"Until Microsoft opens up the specification, the opportunity is
limited."
He continued to explain the current areas of focus. "We are
focusing on Java 2 Enterprise Edition [J2EE] technology as a
framework to build web services on top of. And we will do this
primarily through partners," Spencer said.
Caldera used this week's forum to reiterate that all development
will be done around Intel processor architecture, and promised to
develop a 64-bit Linux in the future. "We are going to invest
hugely in Linux," Spencer said, "and we're going to build Linux for
IA-64."