The 88open Consortium has announced its plans to license its compatibility test technology to other vendors and consortia at a price. The test software, including the system software ITS/88 and AVS/88, and applications test software, ACT/88, are all immediately available for licensing, the price being under one million dollars, according to 88open president Tom Mace. Justifying the price, Mace said that the software was the result of a $6 million development at 88open and would save others years of development time. 88open test technology verifies that systems and applications conform to source, binary and object standards, but is currently confined to software for Motorola 88000-based systems. Mace claims that 450 software packages certified by the test suite are guaranteed to run on the 80 or so different systems using the 88000 chip. This compares, he says, with only 12 applications that will definitely run on all Sparc-based systems, all of which have had to be tested and tweaked for each individual system. Tests include stack checking – for file formats, identifying system calls, portability issues and dynamic parameter tests that run with the software’s own quality assurance suite. Motif-specific tests are also being added. The addition of other vendors using the same process would help applications portability between different architectures, said Mace, and generally increase the quality of software. Consortia, in various stages of maturity, but none as far advanced as 88open, have been set up for Sparc, Rios, Alpha, Precision Architecture and Transputer architectures. However, to convert the software will mean replacing the database, recompilation and optimisation – an effort likely to take less than two man-years and cost $200,000 to 250,000 says Mace. But he is confident that some announcements will be made by year-end on those that decide to take up the offer.
