There had been no agreement reached on a single Common Object Request Broker Architecture 2.0 submission as we went to press ahead of last week’s Object Management Group meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire. The two sides, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co on the one hand, and SunSoft Inc, ICL Plc, Bell Northern Research, Iona Technologies Ltd, Expersoft Corp and IBM Corp on the other, have apparently made headway on some technical issues over the last couple of weeks, but not enough to bridge the schism. Although the Object Group was keen for the proposals to go to the vote at the meeting, if there are enough voices raised the vendors may be granted more time to go away and fix a single specification according to one Nashua-bound delegate. Meanwhile, one source described the Open Software Foundation, DEC and Hewlett-Packard as making the Distributed Computing Environment Remote Procedure Call and Interface Definition Language available free of charge to bolster their chances as simply a ruse. Distributed Computing Environment applications will not run on a Distributed Computing request broker in any case, because the environment’s Interface Definition Language does not support all of the Object Group’s data types. Moreover, the Software Foundation is maintaining change control and copyright so the technology is not, actually in the public domain anyway.
