York, UK — (press release excerpt) — Vita Nuova has changed the pricing structure of its distributed OS, Inferno to enable individual developers to acquire the product at a lower price. It is slashing the price of its personal and academic subscriptions, previously $300 and $200 respectively, to just $100 each. The cost of a Corporate Inferno license, however will double from $1,000 to $2,000 with effect from 1st June 2002.

Inferno, which is royalty-free, was originally developed at Bell Labs, and commercializes some of the most important developments in distributed operating systems theory. It is one of the few systems that provides a radical yet simple mechanism for cross-platform, distributed application development

Inferno is a network operating system based on more than 30 years of research in operating systems and programming languages by Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and others at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. Inferno is clearly a cultural descendant of UNIX, however, it looks out on a very different world from UNIX. Complexity is no longer confined to mainframes but is pervasive throughout world-wide networks. Inferno addresses the complexity as follows:

• Replaces a plethora of protocols by a simple, unifying file service protocol (Styx) that can be served on tiny devices, giving a uniform way to access objects across the network.

• Lets applications 'compute a name space': all resources are represented as file systems, which an application assembles into an application-specific hierarchy or 'name space', private or shared, that hides their source, local or remote, and nature, static or dynamic, for completely transparent access.

• Using those primitives, implements windowing systems, networked graphics, remote debugging, device control, and much more, with remarkable ease and great simplicity.

Inferno runs as a native, embedded operating system on a wide range of processor architectures and also, uniquely, as an emulated operating system environment on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and other systems. It is this portability that makes Inferno the number one choice for distributed application development

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