Open Software Foundation vice-president Ira Goldstein and Distributed Computing Environment business manager Jon Gossels told InterOp audiences in San Jose a few weeks back that the Foundation’s DCE remote procedure call had been endorsed and recommended by the ANSI subcommittee responsible for such things. The assertion was repeated to our sister paper Unigram.X in New York a week later, with the addition that 98% of what was accepted was from the Foundation, 2% from rival Netwise. There’s only one problem with this apparent coup – ANSI RPC subcommittee chairman Mark Hamilton says that it just isn’t true. Hamilton, who in real life works for Netwise, would like to stay above partisan politics for the sake of his chair, but says that Goldstein and Gossels made their InterOp statements before any presentation of the Foundation Remote Procedure Call had even been made to the subcommittee. And as it turned out, the subcommittee adopted a few points and rewrote a few others, but tabled the bulk of the proposal for further study at the next International Standards Organisation meeting. It was submitted, he says, merely as a paper for discussion. Moreover, the meetings held last week to further the discussions have no official status – the nearest decision on remote procedure calls is not expected until next May.
