By Dan Jones

Fahrenheit, the grand plan cooked up by Microsoft Corp, SGI Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co to develop a cross platform set of 3D graphics application programming interfaces has collapsed in a welter of bad blood over plans to port the APIs to the Linux platform and ego conflicts between the three companies.

Microsoft still plans to release Fahrenheit toolkits for Windows 2000 and NT by the middle of next year. However, according to sources at both SGI and HP, because Microsoft is against the idea of supporting Fahrenheit on the Linux operating system the collaborative effort has now fallen apart. SGI has withdrawn from the project, with one source declaring the venture totally over. Meanwhile, HP says that it will support Fahrenheit on its NT and Windows systems but has no plans to port the code to HP-UX unless its workstation customers demand it.

When the project started, Linux was not an operating system with any commercial visibility. However, over the last two years the OS has emerged as a low cost potential rival for NT. Microsoft doesn’t want to put it on Linux, said one source. If Fahrenheit is not supported across the various Unix, Windows and Linux flavors, it removes the entire raison d’etre for SGI and HP being involved with the project, the source said.

When the Fahrenheit project was started back in December 1997 it was trumpeted as a vessel for porting high performance graphics everywhere, from workstations down to consumer electronics devices running Windows CE, such as game consoles. A common set of APIs would cut the development times for graphics applications running on multiple operating systems. The firms planned to boil down elements of SGI’s OpenGL, Microsoft’s DirectX APIs and HP’s work on 3D DirectModel into one cohesive, industry-wide set of APIs. The idea was to bring some of the power of high-end Unix workstations graphics to the masses.

The project also fell apart because of disagreements about exactly what elements of DirectX and OpenGL should be used. According to a source that worked on the project, Microsoft was more concerned about including features that would appeal to developers of gaming and consumer software, while SGI and HP were focused on their core workstation market. Egos got in the way, the source admitted, adding that the code base had become a behemoth as more and more elements were added.

So, despite its lofty initial ideals, Fahrenheit has now become a Microsoft project, with its two former partners taking little or no part in future development work. The Fahrenheit Scene Graph and Fahrenheit Large Model (FLM) extensions toolkits for Windows 98, NT and 2000 will reach the beta stage before the end of the year, according to a Microsoft spokesperson. Microsoft says that it will use third party developers to port the Fahrenheit code to Unix, if HP and SGI choose not to. SGI definitely won’t be porting Fahrenheit to IRIX, preferring to concentrate its efforts on supporting a Linux version of its established OpenGL APIs. Microsoft wouldn’t comment on SGI’s abdication from the project. And HP is now fighting shy of continuing to support Fahrenheit on HP-UX. The amount of interest shown by ISVs does not warrant the effort of porting Fahrenheit to HP-UX, said Munir Mallal, software planning manager of the workstations division at HP, although, he said if interest did pick up, HP would be prepared to do the work. á