Absent when X/Open Co Ltd unveiled its XPG3 branding list last week (CI No 1,440) are Sun Microsystems workstations and DEC’s MIPS RISC-based DECstations – the latter failed on the tar tape backup program according to the firm, and will be re-engineered quickly. X/Open, which reckons to have spent UKP1.5m developing the program, is charging UKP3,000 for testing products, and additional royalty charges of $10 for every for every multi-user system – $5 for single user systems – sold by non-member companies. In the UK, the National Computing Centre is now offering a testing service within its open systems division.Above the base level there are a range of application areas for which X/Open does not define tests, but which are included in the overall XPG3 Common Application Environment.
Rebellious users
If suppliers in these areas can prove theirproducts conform to the guidelines – and X/Open maintains a list of those endorsed then they can use the X/Open stamp, which may mean, according to X/Open, that customers will have to take them on trust. X/Open has no tests for Fortran, Cobol and Pascal, but there are already solid international standards in force, as there are for its chosen windowing environment, X Window. Currently no SQL test for database software exists – though the consortium is confident that the SQL Access Group will come up with proposals that it can adopt. Other areas of the guide that X/Open is working on to establish tests include the transport interface, with protocols that map on to Open Systems Interconnection, TCP/IP, SNA and DECnet, and further additions to kernel-level requirements will be made to support distributed computing features. X/Open believes that within many businesses and organisations, information systems departments have already decided that the open systems road is the one to follow, but are now asking the question – how? As a result the group has started work on a much broader conceptual framework for applications portability – something like a road map for open systems resembling the one that the Inetrnational Standards Organisation is trying to put together, (CI No 1,408), which would presumably include its own portability guide as a sub-set. Indeed such are the efforts that others – such as the French AFUU group – are putting into these that X/Open is pulling out the stops and intends to have a framework within a year. Rebellious groups of Unix users frustrated with internecine wars between Unix International and Open Software Foundation are seeking some 0refuge within the ranks of X/Open’s brigades – the Petrotechnical Software Corporation is all set to join as soon as it up and running, as is the club of large users and vendors which is now coming together in the US. And following X/Open’s presentation to the Unix show in East Berlin, VEB Kombinat Robotron – East Germany’s largest computer company – has applied to join X/Open’s system vendor council: X/Open has also received overtures from Polish and Hungarian groups keen to get in on the open systems act.
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