The Standards Promotion and Application Group SA, SPAG, says that Reading, Berkshire-based X/Open Co Ltd is actively considering acquiring the intellectual property rights to its Process to Support Interoperability specifications. If so, the Group reckons that X/Open may well merge the contents of the Process into its X/Open Portability Guide 4 standard because the two tackle problems that are different but complementary. SPAG as a company will now be disbanded during the first half of this year. But six key technical people are in the process of setting up a small company to offer technical support to current Process to Support Interoperability users. This was due to open its doors on January 1, and is to be called the Louise Group because SPAG is located on the Avenue Louise in Brussels, Belgium. However, X/Open chief technical officer Mike Lambert, speaking at the Xtra conference in Rome a few weeks ago, said that X/Open would only take on the SPAG work if a business case could be made for it. You may have noticed that SPAG went bust, he observed.
