With its self-imposed end-of-June deadline for publishing a common desktop environment specification now just six weeks off, the Common Open Software Environment firms – Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp, Santa Cruz Operation Inc, Sun Microsystems Inc, Univel Inc and Unix System Laboratories Inc – are circulating (internally) a draft form of the Process Paper which covers the scope of COSE and describes who will do what for the first of its promised offerings. The brief contains schedules and an organisational chart. We understand the intent is to go for breadth first, and depth – how the application programming interfaces will actually work – later. It plays hard on the so-called 90-10 rule, claiming that 90% of the code is already out there and that only 10% needs to be written. We understand they want to give the impression that the scope of the common desktop is well understood – but in the full knowledge that underneath, the details have not been fully worked out. One insider said he could not believe the amount of code that will eventually be involved. What his firm is worried about is how it will be able to meet its commitment to deliver an interim COSE-like product before the end of the year. The most pressing requirement is for a COSE developers kit – existing customers of OSF/Motif, IXI Ltd X.desktop or Hewlett-Packard’s Visual User Environment desktops won’t get upgraded until something is out and the danger, according to the source, is that someone will break ranks and ship a developers kit without the blessing of the others. Presently, each of the COSE participants is pledged to brief its partners and licensees on the ramifications of the COSE movement. Unix Labs, by virtue of its position as Unix mama, wanted to be first, and did its pitch the week before last with X/Open Co Ltd explaining the fast track process and Hewlett-Packard observing. Meanwhile Microsoft Corp is waging its own spoiling campaign and is going around trying to persuade small software developers to put their applications up under Windows NT first. The Tuesday morning session at June’s Xhibition show, in San Jose, California – which will include all the COSE people and Microsoft – will be the milestone event where all this is revealed. Just don’t ask any tricky questions about what the object model will be or how the applications will communicate with the desktop.
