ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (09/06/90)
We recently sent out postcards indicating that ISIS V2.1 was already available in the general form. The flood of messages I am getting prompts this posting. The most recent BETA version (from 2 weeks ago) is quite solid and can certainly be used. The "final" V2.1 release has been slightly delayed by the start of the semester here, which has me buried in paper work. We'll have it out soon and will announce it here. I have a list of minor problems people have identified in the BETA release and plan to fix those, but I don't expect to do anything major. The next major release of ISIS will be from ISIS Distributed Systems (IDS). This release will be supported and includes some commercially interesting new features and performance enhancements. IDS is now working on the detailed fee schedule and contract. We are often asked how we plan to reconcile ISIS research at Cornell with this commercial move. Actually, we don't expect it to be hard because our research directions are switching to a some long-term goals. While IDS continues to extend and support ISIS V3.0 and beyond, the ISIS research group will be starting work on a new version of the system that will run in some of the forthcoming nucleus kernels at vastly increased speed... this may not result in anything useful for a while, but when we do things that might be useful to ISIS users, we will certainly continue our policy of public software releases. My feeling is that it is appropriate to continue to discuss ISIS features, issues, and so forth, even regarding the IDS version of ISIS (V3.0), in this newsgroup. However, we also feel that it would be quite inappropriate for IDS to use this space for formal product announcements, advertising, and other "non-technical" postings. If you want to be informed about commercial developments, drop me a note or phone one of us and we'll make sure you are on the IDS mailing list. To address the most common questions I am getting: V3.0 will have no major interface changes from V2.1, but it will run pg_client calls in BYPASS mode and will support the new diffusion group option. It will include a number of new software subsystems, but not all will be available right when the initial release occurs. In the near term we do expect to see a network resource/application manager subsystem and an enhanced version of the ISIS news utility. The latter will be aimed at applications with a need to publish high volumes of data, such as stock quotes. V3.0 licensing will be on a per-CPU basis and down at the pricing levels one expects for other cellophane-wrapped software products. I hope this answers most of the obvious questions.... Ken
rsb@hplb.hpl.hp.com (09/10/90)
Please could you add my name to the distribution list for commercial developments of ISIS. thanks, Rod Bark Hewlett Packard Labs. Filton Road, Stoke Gifford, Bristol, BS12 6QZ UK rsb@hplb.hpl.hp.com