Jeremy Thomas, chairman of the executive committee of Unix International Inc and one of those instrumental in setting up the organisation back in 1988, was still gathering formal approval from its board of directors last week over the recommendation to wind down operations by year-end. As reported, the move is unlikely to be opposed, and senior members of Unix International, currently employing 18 people in Parsippany, New Jersey, will finance its orderly closure. On-going committee work is all likely to be passed on to X/Open Co Ltd. For UnixWare users, a highly focused Novell Inc user group is expected to appear. Thomas is at pains to point out that, at least in the eyes of Unix International members, the organisation has achieved much over the last five years, notably winning the battle to get System V.4 accepted as the industry standard operating system interface.
Lightweight organisation
The Spec 1170 alliance and Novell’s decision (a courageous one, says Thomas) to hand the Unix brand name to X/Open means that the body’s task is over, he declares. Anyway, he adds, consortia are not formed in the normal course of events; they only get together when there really is no alternative. Unix International held a debate through the summer and autumn over what its future should be – whether it should continue in any other form, and whether or not it could offer anything that X/Open and others could not. We could not see any strong enough reason – we had achieved our goals, he says. Concerning NewOrg, Thomas says the debate is still very much open. There are three views. The first says that X/Open is sufficient to take the future process forward, with individual firms or groups of companies proposing extensions and initiatives such as the Common Open Software Environment initiative. The second (at one time favoured by Hewlett-Packard Co) prefers the idea of setting up a core secretariat of five or six people to handle logistics. The third is for a well-funded, 100-person organisation such as NewOrg. Thomas himself appears to lean towards leaving everything to X/Open – in any case, he says, the inevitability of NewOrg is not yet accepted, and the debate continues. Indeed, the economics of such large groups, the obvious current example being the Open Software Foundation, now firmly into adding value rather than operating system development mode, are looking increasingly untenable in the current economic climate. SunSoft Inc’s Jim Billmaier sees the situation in a similar light. Although discussions have been going on for about a year, he says, they are still at the formative stage and haven’t yielded anything solid. While he supports the idea of a lightweight organisation, he is not convinced of the need for a formal body and is happy with X/Open. The COSE process was informal, he declared, and COSE managed to get Common Desktop Environment out the door.
