None of Open Software Foundation’s four European members – Bull, Siemens, Nixdorf, Philips – was ever part of the dissident Hamilton Group. That was a completely American initiative. But all of them acted as interested observers ot the Group’s sundry confrontations with AT&T. And all of them had their own fruitless discussions with AT&T. According to Nixdorf’s man, Bernhard Wobker, We talked with AT&T quite a bit to change its view and handling of things… We complained about our inability to influence the development plan and the inequality of the licensing arrangements… There were months of discussion. They ignored our requests. Bull did some talking too. It had two basic problems, according to Georges Lepicard.
Pointed enough We were not informed in advance of definitions in a release of the operating system, and AT&T’s licence arrangement was obliging us to conform to a spec like Remote File Sharing that we might not have much use for. As an AT&T Unix licensee Siemens like everybody else had permanent discussions going on. That was the forum in which it voiced its concerns, Albrecht Doehler said: Whether we would have access to the release and enhancements at the same time as Sun. Though Philips didn’t jump on the Foundation bandwagon until May 16, the day before the public announcement of its formation, it’s one of the original founders as far as its brethren are concerned and it’s committed to contributing its $13.5m – $4.5m a year for three years – like everybody else. It will also ante up some technical know-how exactly what is under study – and it will have a man on the board – when it gets around to naming him. Until then, the press will have to make do with corporate statements out of headquarters in Holland. Even so they’re pointed enough and echo to the letter the motivation of its mates in joining Foundation: Philips is worried about the openness of Unix because of the latest developments with AT&T and Sun because of the damning belief that Unix is being geared especially towards the Sun Sparc computer. Reports are circulating now among long-time Unix folk that say Cassoni could have saved the situation even at this point – and probably gotten what he wanted into the bargain – had he been a little more diplomatic and a little less intransigent; if he had been cut from a subtle AT&T broadcloth rather than a stiff Italian import. Cassoni, however, appears to have had his back to the wall by now. AT&T’s decision to mate with Sun, near as can be gathered, was under attack from both outside and inside AT&T. A situation that is apt to make any man defensive, especially one who by nature isn’t a negotiator and simply wants his way. Not wanting to comment on things that happened while he was still at AT&T, Cassoni, now fled back to Olivetti where he’s been made managing director, rebuffed attempts to get an interview with him. At least one of the ways out would have been for AT&T to commit to the eventual spin off of Unix into a separate company. That kind of offer, Wobker says, would have stopped the Foundation dead in its tracks. Instead, hints of such a compromise came too late – and only from the new AT&T management team. None of the four Europeans can pinpoint with any accuracy exactly when their companies became involved in the Foundation. For some it was just a case of events moving them along. Lepicard says that after certain pivotal meetings took place between the Hamilton Group and AT&T – probably at or around Uniforum in early February but maybe earlier – a momentum developed that more or less swept interested by-standers like Bull into the Open Software Foundation. Bull’s participation may also be something of a foregone conclusion considering its close association with Apollo. It is after all Apollo’s largest end user in Europe. Nixdorf wasn’t involved in the beginning either, says Wobker. It was invited in at a later stage. It was informed of things that were going on at Uniforum but at that point it wasn’t part of the formal discussions. It joined perhaps three or four weeks before the
Foundation went public. A couple of days after getting an idea of what Foundation was all about, the Nixdorf board, the highest levels of the corporation, made its decision. The speed of their deliberations is noteworthy. European companies generally like to chew over their decisions a lot longer than Americans. What helped persuade them, says another Foundation sponsor, was the detailed explanation of the aims of Foundation presented to the board in person in Germany by X/Open chairman Jim Bell, a Hewlett guy who played an integral part in Foundation’s formation. Doehler has trouble with the precise Siemens chronology too. There were so many meetings and discussions and conference calls it’s hard to remember exactly. Surely there were first discussions in March and by April things were concrete. The companies had reached a common understanding and knew they had a common interest: the continued development of a truly open environment.
American members of Foundation kept better notes and they say Bull and Siemens had representatives at the consortium planning meeting that was held at a DEC facility in Massachusetts on March 11 and again at the end of March at Hewlett offices in Sunnyvale – both of which took place before IBM was even included. By April 5, Apollo, DEC and Hewlett had what they called jump start teams in place, seconding their own personnel over to help make the breakaway effort a reality. These were all experts in four critical areas: marketing, public relations, research and development and legal.
IBM jump start Towards the end of the month, IBM sent its jump start people in but it wasn’t until the week of May 9, the week before the announcement, that the Europeans had their people working with the US teams, though it is true that Bull had one representative at the jump start meetings from their inception. What might have clinched Siemens’ participation was a phone call Apollo chairman Tom Vanderslice made to Siemens chairman Karlheinz Kaske one midnight shortly before Foundation’s fateful May 17 launch. Vanderslice is also credited with rounding up Bull and IBM itself. Doehler confirms reports that the initial idea was for four American companies, IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard and Apollo, to go it alone and make their announcement on May 10. (Computergram readers first got wind that those four were plotting something with their May 9 issue). Then somebody somewhere along the line realised that the group would garner more power – in Doehler’s words – with the European contingent in there from the start, and so they delayed going public with the news until May 17. The delay, he says, derived solely from organisational concerns like setting up the Geneva end of the satellite announcement and inviting several hundred European journalists to attend.
