Digital Equipment Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, Hitachi Ltd and IBM Corp, plus IBM’s Transarc Corp, have finally signed up to their joint development agreement for version 1.2 of the Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment and were due to present details of their plan last week. Distributed Computing Environment 1.2, which under the old-style Open Foundation was originally promised by the end of 1995, will be managed through one of the Software Foundation’s Pre-Structured Technology groups. The vendors optimistically talk of having code by the end of the year, and products by 1996, but in the five-year history of Distributed Computing Environment we can’t remember anything actually making it out on time. DCE 1.1 binaries will only begin showing this summer. The old-style Software Foundation envisaged 1.2 as a $10m development; the new model has whittled it down by maybe a third. Final changes were handed down though a Software Foundation architecture programming council meeting in the UK last week. Rather than a pot of development money going to a prime contractor, this time around each vendor gets to do a piece of the work on its own system, followed by conversion and interoperability work to the other systems. DEC and Hewlett-Packard will be doing the majority of the work, it’s understood. The goal of 1.2 has not changed: its focus is greater scalability, usability, manageability and easier end-user deployment. There are file system enhancements and performance tuning; the only real architectural change will be an RSA Data Security Inc-type public key encryption security mechanism that will be offered alongside existing Kerberos private key authentification. Public key security is more lightweight and does not pre-suppose an on-line authentification server on the network, although Kerberos offers additional security services that public key does not. Promised enhancements to Federated Naming Service for Distributed Computing Environment to bring it in line with X/Open Co Ltd’s Sun Microsystems Inc ONC+-derived naming scheme will be part of a separate project. Software Foundation politics aside – it is still facing a $100m anti-trust lawsuit – the Distributed Computing Environment has attracted a lot of flak recently, in part because its proponents oversold it at the outset, and secondly, because trying to implement the technology in a native mode has proved extremely difficult even for the largest organisations.
