IBM insists that Monterey really isn’t dead. Its just metamorphed into AIX 5L. too bad, Caldera/SCO, IBM’s main Monterey partner wasn’t told.

Ransom Love, Caldera Systems’ CEO said that IBM’s announcement that Monterey was completed “could not have been an official statement. We have partnership agreements with IBM and it would not be appropriate for IBM to declare the project done.” That said, Love agreed that many of Monterey’s goals had been completed. He also said that that the Linuxication of Monterey AIX 5L was a good thing for both AIX and Linux users.

Caldera/SCO’s take can be summed up as they can see why Monterey should move on. After all, with the advances of Project Trillian, 64-bit Linux for Intel, there’s little practical point to spending more time and effort on advancing another 64-bit Unix. IBM’s timing and presentation, however, are another matter.

Officially, IBM is saying “IBM has accomplished its objectives as set forth in the Project Monterey initiative.” In other words, that AIX 5L for the RS/6000 and IA-64 is simply Monterey taken to the next step. An executive at another Unix system vendor, however, icily commented that “Isn’t it hard to declare a project over when the silicon (IA-64) isn’t even ready for deployment?”

And, in fact, those next steps, however, aren’t completely laid out yet. An IBM spokesperson said today, “that not all the code of Project Monterey will not be included in the first release of AIX 5L; Version 5.0.” In past, though, IBM has also characterized Monterey as a version of Unix based on AIX as well as an evolutionary step in AIX.

Other observers were even more critical of IBM’s spin of its operating system news. Hetz Ben-Hamo, system administrator at Israeli software development company, Intercomp and open source developer, comments that, “more then HALF of what project Monterey features that should have been there – are not. Monterey is D-E-A-D! Only some parts of Monterey will be folded to the next version of AIX OS.”