“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.”
“In addition to the new business model, however, Jeffrey said
developers will be drawn to Inferno because it is a technically
powerful technology for creating network-based applications. For
one thing, he said, Inferno is highly scalable, which means it can
be embedded into very small devices – it can be used in a mere 30
kilobytes of memory – and it can also run on a variety of processor
architectures and larger operating systems (OSes) such as
Microsoft’s Windows, Linux and Sun Microsystems’ Solaris.”