Lucent spinoff Vita Nuova releases Inferno OS source

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Jun. 20, 2000

Murray Hill, NJ, and York, ENGLAND -- (press release) -- Lucent Technologies and Vita Nuova, a network operating systems software provider, today announced that Vita Nuova has obtained the exclusive, global rights to the Inferno Operating System from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. Effective immediately, Vita Nuova is making the Inferno source code available to subscribers under inexpensive, commercial license terms.

Lucent Technologies' New Ventures Group and United Kingdom investor SEDS Limited have invested in Vita Nuova to develop and market Inferno. The exact amount was not disclosed. Vita Nuova becomes the 20th venture announced by Lucent's New Ventures Group.

Designed for use with network devices and Internet appliances, Inferno offers a complete solution that can run native or hosted; is ideal for resource constrained environments; is highly scaleable; and employs a C-like programming language that is concurrent, safe, and enables dynamic loading of modules. With Inferno, developing distributed applications and integrating with legacy systems is radically simplified through a revolutionary approach whereby all resources on a network are represented as files and accessed with basic file operations (open, close, read, write) familiar to any programmer.

"We are delighted that Vita Nuova is taking the Inferno operating system, language, and application technologies to the next step," said Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of the UNIX operating system and creator of the C programming language, as well as head of the System Software Research Department at Bell Labs, where Inferno was conceived. "Vita Nuova is commercializing Inferno in the real world of network computing, while continuing to create new technology to support and sustain its unique combination of approaches for building products."

Michael Jeffrey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Vita Nuova, added: "Inferno is a fusion of the most innovative ideas in operating systems technology and the latest ideas in software licensing. We are building a community of experienced software technologists who are excited by Inferno's file based distributed computing metaphor. Within our community the principles of open source will prevail in such a way that all of our members can profit both individually and collectively from their efforts."

Vita Nuova is making Inferno available under a subscription license that is similar to the type used by open source software. A personal annual subscription is priced at $300 and includes all the source code to Inferno, ports to a wide range of architectures, Inferno manual and papers, a C cross compiler suite and access to news, updates and new components. Academic subscriptions are available for $150 and corporate subscriptions start at $1,000 (covers 5 developers' use).

"Unrestricted by the legacy of earlier operating systems, Inferno will show that for network computing there truly is a better way," said Tom Uhlman, president of Lucent Technologies' New Ventures Group. "Vita Nuova is ready and able to develop a vibrant Inferno community based on the world-class Bell Labs Inferno technology."

Affordable system software with zero distribution royalties has become an imperative in the competitive world of device manufacturing. All subscribers can distribute and sell copies of Inferno or modified versions of Inferno without paying any royalties and can distribute source code among themselves.

Inferno subscribers are licensed to:

Distribute or sell, without paying royalties, binary copies of Inferno.
Distribute or sell, without paying royalties, source code to Inferno's unique components to other Inferno subscribers.
Distribute or sell, without paying royalties, the rest of the source code to anyone.
Keep modifications private, although sharing is encouraged.

Inferno technology has already been commercially deployed. Lucent uses Inferno technology in several of its advanced communications products including its Softswitch and PathStar Access Server. Vita Nuova is currently developing consumer applications that exploit Inferno's unique capabilities under contract with several Internet appliance manufacturers.

About the Inferno Operating System (www.vitanuova.com)

Inferno is a complete solution composed of a virtual operating system, safe concurrent language, fundamental protocol, and portable development environment. It is not constrained by historical approaches yet works with legacy systems facilitating co-operation between them.

Inferno's distributed computing metaphor represents all resources on a network (data, services, computers, network interfaces and devices) as files in a forest of hierarchical file systems. Programmers can therefore access all resources, local or remote, through the same set of 4 familiar file operations.

Underlying the file metaphor is a single unifying protocol (Styx), which provides the common language for all Inferno components. Inferno emphasizes the use of a scaleable well-defined protocol, not complex programs such as object brokers, for distribution and inter-communication. The OS itself is scaleable: an Inferno stub can be as small as a few thousand bytes; complete native versions will operate in 1MB, and hosted versions can run on large multi-processor machines.

Inferno was first created by the software engineering team Sean Dorward, Rob Pike, Phil Winterbottom, Eric Grosse, Dave Presotto, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and Howard Trickey, who were all members of the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center in New Jersey, USA.

About Vita Nuova

Founded in 1996 to help develop and commercially deploy Inferno technology, Vita Nuova is a privately held company based in York, England that has obtained the exclusive, global rights to the Inferno Operating System from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. Vita Nuova is developing and marketing the Inferno Operating System, building a broad user base and revenue streams from subscriptions, technical services and support, as well as vertical market applications.

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