In a development that will indirectly bolster the AT&T-aligned Archer group in its battle with the Open Software Foundation, the IPA, Information technology Promotion Agency in charge of the Ministry of International Trade & Industry-sponsored Sigma project, is to establish an operating system standardisation committee with a remit to examine the issues and make proposals on Unix standardisation. The Sigma OS is based on Unix System V.2 where the industry is now rapidly moving towards System V.4; accordingly, the new committee will review world trends towards standardisation and consequent changes required to the Sigma OS. The Sigma Project is a Japanese national effort to address the acute dearth of software developers by designing a standard hardware and software environment to accelerate application development.
