The Open Group board voted Friday to defer acceptance of the Active Group Pre-Structured Technology (PST) which is intended to house future development and licensing of key Windows object specifications and technology that Microsoft Corp and its ActiveX stakeholders agreed to turn over to the organization at a meeting in New York on October 1. Reportedly there were too many TBDs and what were described as open variables in the high- level draft of the joint development submission that the board had in hand to satisfy everyone. Supposedly the relationship with the Object Management Group and interoperability with OMG’s rival Corba object specifications was one of those variables. Microsoft needed a majority vote of nine of the 16 Open Group directors to get the proposal ratified and the Active Group actually launched. The attitude of the Japanese companies represented on the board was one of the unknowns and it is unclear whether they held the key votes. Sun Microsystems Inc said it wasn’t objecting to Microsoft or to the PST per se, only to the fact that it was being rammed through. Before the vote it told our sister publication ClieNT Server News that Microsoft was effectively asking for a ‘blank check’ without defining its vision and indicating in the draft such things as licensing terms, whether the specification will be turned over to the Open Group’s X/Open Co Ltd’s arm for standardization via an ISO fast track, whether the specification will be open to the public or remain basically a private deal. At the time it was thought that if the board deferred the PST, it would reportedly be until the next board meeting in Rome December 11. The proposal being voted on was to create and Active Group within the Open Group, controlled by a steering committee appointed by, and including Microsoft that would develop and license ActiveX technologies including the Common Object Model (COM), Distributed COM (DCOM) and Microsoft’s royalty-free MS-RPC variant of the OSF Distributed Computing Environment remote procedure call, plus the other storage, registry, security, monikers and automation specifications that Redmond turns over.
