Redwood Shores, CA Ð NeXT's historic agreement with SunSoft, announced here November 23, leaves NeXT with a dual role as operating-system vendor and provider of open-systems technology.
Under the agreement, Sun will license portions of NEXTSTEP for use in a future version of its Solaris operating system, and NeXT will bring a native version of NEXTSTEP to Sun's SPARC-based computers in the second half of 1994.
As part of the agreement, Sun has made a $10-million equity investment in NeXT. SunSoft President Ed Zander said the company is buying "time to market," acknowledging NeXT's two- to three-year lead in object-oriented technology over competing vendors such as Taligent and Microsoft (see related story below).
NeXT will define and publish a specification called OpenStep, which consists of a subset of the existing APIs in NEXTSTEP 3.2. Although details are still being worked out, the specification is expected to include all portions of NEXTSTEP that are independent of the operating system, including AppKit, DBKit, Display PostScript, distributed objects, and Objective-C. The specification, to be published by June 30, 1994, will be freely licensed to all comers in a move to make NEXTSTEP the standard operating and development environment for client-server systems. Talks have begun with standards bodies on administering the licensing process.
NeXT CEO Steve Jobs likened NeXT's decision to license its technology to the approach taken by Adobe Systems with PostScript in the early 80s. PostScript is now the industry-standard page-description language.
Sun's decision to marry OpenStep with its Solaris operating system will come as a surprise to many in the open-systems community who have long viewed NEXTSTEP as a proprietary operating system. "I was surprised we could pull this off given our religious differences. We didn't know what church to get married in," said Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO.