Against the backdrop of Novell Inc’s attempts to move the Unix specification into X/Open Co Ltd, the Common Open Software Environment chieftains continue to busy themselves cleaning up the mess left by the Unix Wars and formalising their loose coalition into a real live consortium, now nick-named NewOrg. SunSoft Inc, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co con-ceive of the agency as a small East Coast unit staffed by 30 or 40 experienced marketeers and folks that know how to cut a joint development agreement – and no software engi-neers. In this last respect at least, as one source pointed out, it is not the Open Software Foundation done over. Otherwise, it might be. Its board of directors will be the companies that spend the big bucks founding it and there will be different tiers of membership, apparently open to all comers. Its purpose is not only to promote the Unix specification but to influence its development and then persuade X/Open Co, the Supreme Body, to bless it. Japanese companies, in-cluding Fujitsu Ltd, and to a certain extent Novell and Digital Equipment Corp, a latecomer to the COSE combine, are said to be interested. The amounts needed to buy in have apparently not yet been set, nor has any-one been chosen to run it. The COSEs are said to be anxious to move the new fixture into place before Comdex/Fall when Microsoft Corp is expected to make a big splash with Windows NT. An announcement date early in November is expected, Tuesday November 9 being the one Unigram.X heard. (Now that we said that they’ll probably change it). One of the by-products of NewOrg will be deflation of both Unix International and of the Open Software Foundation. pletely until the Comite Co-ordination de Telecommunication acts on the Direction’s request to liberate bandwidth permanently for wireless local area network use. The Comite, which advises prime minister Edouard Balladur, comprises the Direction Reglementation, inRG, the Executive Audiovisual Council, and the Military Office for National Frequencies. When we will get that decision, I don’t know, he said, but I’m not desperate about getting the approval. You have to believe in the logic of things like this. I also think our military is pretty open to the economic reality of things.
