News
Microsoft Buys Softway
- By Scott Bekker
- September 21, 1999
Adding more support and interoperability for Unix, Microsoft Corp. purchased the assets of Softway Systems Inc. (www.interix.com), a privately-held San Francisco-based company.
Softway makes Interix, a suite of Unix utilities and developer tools that allow developers to port Unix scripts and applications to Windows NT with minimal changes. Interix provides a subsystem on Windows NT that is Posix.1 compliant and offers many features of Unix operating systems, such as Posix.2 support, providing compatibility between Windows and Unix solutions.
With these technologies, Microsoft is hoping customers will have confidence using Windows NT/2000, and developers will begin migrating their code to run natively on Windows. Currently Windows customers use Microsoft's Services for Unix.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Many members of Softway's development team and other key employees will join Microsoft. The Redmond software giant has not announced any product configurations or pricing for new technologies. -- Brian Ploskina
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.