Initial reference implementations for the Open Software Foundation’s ArchitectureNeutral Distribution Format will be for Ultrix, Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unix, SunOS and the like: OSF/1 is not among them, because the submitters were asked to develop on a system of their choice. An OSF/1 reference implementation will be done between the first snapshot and the final offering. Until April, winning submitter the UK Royal Signals & Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire was one of four Ministry of Defence research bodies. The four became a single government-owned organisation – the Defence Research Agency. RSRE is now the Electronics Division of the Research Agency abbreviated to dread initials as DRAED. The Defence Research Agency as a whole has 12,000 staff and a turnover of $1bn, while Electronics Division has around 800 engineers working on in-house research. It bid for the Architecture-Neutral Request for Technology because it had been working on the technology for the last five years. DRAED’s Ten15 Distribution Format technology is also being adopted by the European Community’s Esprit Open Microprocessor Initiative, a project that is running around a year behind the Software Foundation’s effort according to Dr Nicholas Peeling, TDF project manager at DRAED. It hasn’t actually chosen TDF – but it isn’t considering anything else, said Dr Peeling. There’ll be an early version of the Distribution Format snapshot in the next couple of months. The snapshot proper will follow during the quarter after that – the completed architecture will be delivered late next year or early 1993. The Open Software Foundation won’t say with which independent software vendors it’s working, but there are understood to be a handful – software applications can be developed to the Format from the snapshot. The Open Software Foundation will be holding a portathon next year when it’ll try and get as many applications across as possible. Although the Foundation cannot legally demand exclusive rights to TDF, Peeling says DRAED has no plans to license the technology to anyone else – except the Esprit project. It smells of exclusivity, but legally it isn’t, he said. There are already licensing mechanisms in place for the Distribution Format Installer and Producer, according to the Foundation’s business area manager Pat Riemitis, but terms have not been disclosed. She said the Foundation got the thumbs up, from its members over the choice of technology, and all other submitters totally support ANDF. Indeed, Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and Hewlett-Packard Co have already asked for snapshots, she says. The Open Software Foundation will now be looking for third-party development tools to support the Format. Target market for the thing is the high volume, mass commercial and business sector. The Software Foundation is going to tout the Format around the software vendor community for them to rip apart and see what they’d like to be added or changed. In Peeling’s group of 25 developers, around a dozen are engaged on Ten15 Distribution Format full-time. Other projects on the go there are novel database techniques. TDF is the nearest the Research Agency Electronic Division will ever get to a product, he says. The Ministry of Defence wanted TDF productised so that it could use it, and wouldn’t consider using it until it became a product. We’re not in it for the money, says Peeling; TDF cost only UKP1m to develop.
