VITA NUOVA PUBLISHES SOURCE CODE FOR INFERNO OPERATING SYSTEM, MOVING NETWORK COMPUTING INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

Lucent Technologies (NYSE: LU) 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.

Inferno is answering the current and growing need in the marketplace for distributed computing solutions. Based on more than 20 years of Bell Labs research into operating systems and programming languages, Inferno is poised to propel network computing into the 21st century. Bell Labs will continue to support the evolution of Inferno under a joint development agreement with Vita Nuova.

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.

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.

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 Vita Nuova

Founded in 1996 to help develop and commercially deploy Inferno technology, Vita Nuova (www.vitanuova.com) 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.