In a candid interview with our sister paper Unigram.X last week, Open Software Foundation chief David Tory explained some of the ideological incompatibilities – and straightforward cost reasons – why it decided to relinquish membership of the X/Open Co Ltd standards group at the end of last year. In Tory’s view, X/Open was created on the back of Unix, and is still Unix-oriented it therefore focuses on less than 10% of the market. Tory says X/Open has always been about portability, bringing together the different versions of Unix such as OSF/1, AIX and System V.4 and the rest via its Portability Guides, But, at the end of the day, IBM isn’t going to support Portability Guide 4-compliance on its MVS operating system. Open systems, he argues, have to be about interoperability, and X/Open is only now begining to realise that. X/Open is still focused on compatibility issues between Unix applications and systems. The Foundation’s agenda is more than that, it is about interoperability, allowing everything from mainframes to personal computers to work with each other. Why did we pull out? We just couldn’t afford it, and X/Open was so focused on Unix. Tory says the Foundation asked X/Open if it could establish some kind of special membership for it. X/Open said no. He says the Foundation then asked how it could remain part of X/Open’s overall process. X/Open said talk to our independent software vendor council. We did that and the independent software vendor council said that’s not possible, you’re not an independent software vendor. So we asked whether any kind of special relationship would be possible. We asked them to send us something. We have heard nothing. Nevertheless, in a more reconciliatory tone, Tory admits, X/Open provides an important function. It is moving in the right direction and we want to deal with them. For its part, X/Open says it is still looking at ways to maintain some kind of relationship with the Foundation. Meantime, X/Open, much like Unix System Labs, says it is still negotiating with the Foundation over terms for Distributed Computing Environment technology, parts of which X/Open is likely to adopt in its standard for distributed computing, due to be announced very soon.
