Late Thursday night in Chicago, the IEEE’s Computer Society Posix Technical Committee on Operating Systems scotched the hopes of both the Open Software Foundation and Unix International Inc by agreeing to accept neither the Software Foundation’s Motif user interface nor Unix International’s Open Look as part of the Posix standard. The Committee, which finally closed the discussion towards midnight on Thursday, effectively put the proposal on ice. It appears that the working group did not want to sacrifice the industry consensus it has managed to keep so far by choosing one of two opposing products. Privately, it was thought that given a year, the situation might be clear enough for a decision to be made. Meanwhile, two Posix committees are now at work on hiding the differences between Open Look and Motif, at least from a programmers point of view. The 1202.1 group is working on a layered applications programming interface, aiming for common code to produce Open Look, Motif, Macintosh and MS-Windows interfaces – the front runner is currently technology from XVT Inc of Boulder, Colorado. The 1201.2 committee is working on a common style guide for all windows implementations.
