Recriminations continue to fly over the circumstances of the schism that led the Open Software Foundation and Unix International into a shameful betrayal of users and unaligned members of the computer industry. Maureen O’Gara reports.

The Open Software Foundation cancelled the meeting Unix International’s negotiating team was expecting to have last week with its the Foundation counterparts during which, the AT&T camp maintained, it hoped to find out the real reasons the Foundation left the Project Unity bargaining table. The meeting was set for last Tuesday, April 17th, in London where an X/Open board meeting was also scheduled, and would have involved some people flying out on Easter Sunday so that they could meet amongst themselves and then go to dinner with the opposing side Monday night. On Thursday, April 12, the Foundation chief David Tory reportedly called Unix International president Peter Cunningham to tell him that the Foundation’s team would not be there. Tory offered to meet with Unix International’s people instead.

Indian-giving

His suggestion was rejected as non-productive, since Tory was not party to any of the negotiations that had taken place in the last 90 days. The impasse left Unix International to try to contact the Foundation negotiators, including chief negotiator Tom Uhlman of Hewlett-Packard, Glenn Johnson of DEC, Rick Corbin of Apollo and John Paul of Nixdorf, individually to see if a face-to-face sit-down is still possible. One Foundation negotiator, who said Unix International must either be disingenuous or stupid in maintaining that it could not fathom the reasons the Foundation halted the talk, said nothing had been scheduled as of late last week. He suggested that the rancour and bitterness his team still feels over Unix International’s attitude and the uncompromising stance it maintained during the talks would make any further discussions between them fruitless. However, he thought it proper for Tory and Cunningham to meet again to chew over further technology accords. Then, adding to the widely held suspicions of agendas within agendas, bad faith and Indian-giving surrounding the collapse of the Unity talks, comes the contention from Unix International’s side that a consensus on the spin-out of AT&T’S Unix operating system into a brand new publicly held company as opposed to a closely held one – had been reached by the two sides as early as the beginning of March. It is further alleged that the negotiating teams had yet to delve very deeply into issues such as when this would happen or how it would be structured – the kind of issues the Foundation alleges caused them to walk out – at the time the Foundation pulled the plug on the talks. One OSFer, who personally believes that AT&T Data Systems president Robert Kavner broke the spirit of the non disclosure agreements protecting the substance of the talks from public scrutiny in some of his comments to the press last week, maintained there was no consensus on forming a public company on the Open Software Foundation’s part. The Foundation, he said, did not want the new company to go public immediately, because of the fiduciary responsibility incumbent on the board of such an entity to operate for maximum profitability. Instead the Foundation believed it was necessary for the company to be closely held at the outset so that decisions and investments could be made based on the good of the industry rather than gross profits. This contention seems to fly in the face of charges that the Foundation was pressing AT&T to sell Unix off right away and that AT&T was backing a timed release. The OSFer did not mention an item believed to have been contained in at least an original proposal discussed by both sides that there be two entities: a for-profit company and a foundation into which X/Open and Unix International’s membership would have been subsumed, which would have been charged with doing Requests For Technology and would have been capable of going off on its own to do its own software should insurmountable problems arise. The Software

Foundation source maintained that the Foundation group made enormous concessions during an early March meeting, and that in the next meeting in Palo Alto, California, March 19 and 20 the other side rejected everything – anything substantive to a common ground. The reaction shook the Foundation negotiating team, he said, but maintained that they felt a strong obligation to the Foundation board to look for anything that they could agree on.

No win-win scenarios

Unix International’s behaviour was such, he claimed, that even Unix International people were surprised that the Foundation was still talking after two days. He said they heard no win-win scenarios, only why the proposal would be a win for Unix International’s independent software vendors, users and employees. When Unix International was flatly accused of trying to subvert the Foundation’s decision-making process, Unix International allowed that that comment was a good summary. When Unix International added a new requirement late in the day and the Foundation protested that it was a violation of the Foundation principles, they were told that’s why it’s there. And in the seeming opposition to Unix International’s story, the OSFer maintained that on March 20 investment banker Morgan Stanley, acting for AT&T’s side, offered a proposal for how the board should be constituted. Further, the OSFer declared, the equity division consistently floated by AT&T throughout the months of talks was a 46%, 46%, 8% split, with AT&T claiming the 8% set aside for employees as theirs for decision-making purposes. Lastly, the OSFer claimed that short shrift was given to how the Foundation employees would be handled and the effect on their morale, and focus put on Bell Labs and Unix Software Operation folk, a tender-hearted concern developed by AT&T over the last few months, according to the Foundation suspicions. The the OSFer said that the problem of how to handle staff, although an intricate one, was solvable, but that AT&T never addressed the issue with any imagination.