Despite its somewhat insecure-looking future, the Open Software Foundation says pricing and licensing terms for its Distributed Management Environment services will be announced at InterOp on August 25. The DME services are software distribution, print management, licence management, event service, subsystem management, and personal computer services. They are derived from technologies supplied variously by Hewlett-Packard Co, Gradient Technologies Inc, Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology and Wang Laboratories Inc. Availability and terms for the print management component will be announced next year. The Foundation says the third snapshot of Distributed Management Environment code, released last month, included functionally complete distributed services code, and that most of the development work over the past year has been focussed on integrating DME services with its Distributed Computing Environment. The overall future for Distributed Management Environment however remains as unclear as it was last time we asked about its status: unknown. Talks are apparently still going with IBM Corp, which is intended to do the integration work that the Foundation can’t manage. Timescales are slipping: indeed why, observers ask, do Common Open Software Environment firms – including Open Software Foundation founders IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp – have systems management technology on their development agenda, if DME is progressing as planned? Some say the Foundation is in trouble in its struggle to get the technology ready.
