As reported on Monday (CI No 1,749), X/Open Co Ltd’s position as the predominant open systems standards body is seemingly being threatened by designs by the US National Institute of Standards & Technology government agency to establish itself as the centre for worldwide open systems requirements. In the hefty set of proposals currently circulating, the Standards Institute and the Group of Ten, through which the Institute is working, are urging the creation of yet another supposedly neutral North American specifications body – this one invested with sweeping powers to define not only all open systems standards along with their conceptual framework but also the very products vendors are expected to produce. This all-embracing OSI-based Open Systems Environment, as they call it, to be hammered out jointly by vendors and users and aimed at accelerating the delivery of interoperable products from the vendors, would dictate standard implementations of such specific issues as all the features involved in networking services, data management, graphics, programming, user interfaces, data interchange and operating systems, down to, and including the kernel. The structure in which the Institute is proposing to house such gargantuan activity is its own Open Systems Interconnection Implementors Workshops, which would be gradually broadened beyond its Open Systems protocols heritage, overhauled to give users a stronger position and rechristened the Open Systems Environment Implementors Workshop. Discussion of such a move, which would require heightened vendor participation, is apparently set for the OSI Implementors Workshop conference to be held next week on September 9 to 13. Such a scheme, if it ever comes to fruition, would naturally negate the importance of X/Open’s Xtra process and diminish the organisation’s sphere of influence. In fact, the new Implementors Workshop would effectively usurp X/Open’s new role entirely by also acting as go-between with other user groups and vendor consortia. The spectre of such an organisation getting even partly off the ground has touched off fears of further fragmentation in the industry. The Group of Ten, also called the SOS companies after their initial specification, the Strategy for Open Systems, represent firms with massive information technology budgets enough conceivably to force vendors to create Implementors Workshop-compliant product lines even if other firms do not join the Workshop. The Group, which is believed by some to be a subset of still another Standards & Technology Institute-created organisation, PDES Inc, is reportedly spearheaded by factions inside Du Pont Co and General Motors Corp, and includes Merck Inc, AMR Corp’s American Airlines, Eastman Kodak Co, Unilever NV, 3M Co, Motorola Inc, Northrup Inc and McDonnell Douglas Corp. The Open Systems Environment Implementors Workshop proposal has also unleashed fears of sinister forces, including the government, at work manipulating the Group of Ten for their own ends. This theory is advanced by quarters that point to the fact that the initial SOS specification, circulated as a letter, asked vendors to adopt Open Software Foundation products such as Motif, Distributed Computing Enviroment and Distributed Management Environment as de facto standards and draw conclusions from the fact that the only hardware companies to be part of PDES Inc are IBM Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, all of them Foundation founders. Such a bias is again repeated in the Implementors Workshop proposal which suggests that the two Environments warrant early and priority consideration. The Group of Ten, however, may not characterise such influence as sinister considering that Du Pont is on the Foundation board and IBM and Digital are its strategic vendors. But it does present the industry with a serious possibility – the prospect of destroying the whole notion of standards and creating virtual monopolies by promulgating product specifications as standards.
Dilemma
X/Open is also faced with a dilemma of its own, considering the SOS
specification appears to be a derivative of Standards Institutes’ own Application Portability Profile, and gives only short shrift to X/Open’s work, which might also become short-lived if the industry accepts the SOS framework as the definition open systems. Furthermore, Group of Ten organisers have elsewhere suggested that they might leverage off the User Alliance’s requirement process to bootstrap the operation, ignoring X/Open completely. Industry organisations say they are currently attempting to understand exactly what the Standards Institute and the Group are attempting to achieve, whose agendas are whose, and how deep their commitments run. For instance, the Institute, Du Pont and General Motors are believed to have subscribed to the idea of expanding the OSI Implementors Workshop and in fact to the whole proposal. In addition, the very massiveness of the proposal has created some credibility problems for its backers, especially since critical items such as transition, structure, administration, funding, supply-side support, time to market and public accountability are not well-explored and concern over duplicated efforts is only paid lip service.
