Todd Spangler, editor of [email protected] Week, offers a perspective on yesterday's announcement by Lucent Technologies that it has exclusively licensed the Bell Labs developed Inferno operating system to Vita Nuovo. Vita Nuovo, a Lucent spinoff, concurrently announced that Inferno will be offered on a royalty-free, available-source (non-GPL) basis. Spangler writes . . .

“A small British software company thinks it has the right business model to turn Inferno — the operating system developed by Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs — into a powerhouse platform for distributed computing that will rival Linux.”

“Michael Jeffrey, Vita Nuova's chief executive, said the company is initiating a new, royalty-free licensing model for Inferno that takes its cue from the open source world of Linux, but with an important distinction: Unlike a traditional source code licensing agreement, Vita Nuova's terms do not require customers to turn the code they develop over to the Inferno community . . .”

“Another one of Inferno's strength is the simplicity of its network protocol, according to Jeffrey. All network resources are represented as files in a hierarchical system; therefore, accessing network resources in Inferno is as straightforward as making a 'file open' call.”

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Related story:
Lucent spinoff Vita Nuova releases Inferno OS source

 
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