At Microsoft Corp’s carefully orchestrated meeting of 84 ActiveX stakeholders, which voted to turn control of Redmond’s key object technology specifications over to the Open Group, Netscape Communications Corp expressed dismay at the lack of provision for creating interoperability between objects using ActiveX and the Object Management Group’s alternative Corba Internet Inter-ORB Protocol, IIOP. Moreover, why create a process where it’s not needed? asked Carl Cagill the company’s standards program director. OMG already has the expertise in object standardization. The vote means that for the foreseeable future there will be two incompatible models available to object-oriented application developers. While outgoing Open Group boss Jim Bell said he’d welcome the opportunity to expand the group’s relationship with the Object Group, neither he nor Microsoft group vice-president Paul Maritz could offer anything concrete to the New York delegates beyond suggesting that if there is genuine desire for Corba interoperability then we will examine it. The Open Group says it will create one of its Pre-Structured Technology projects to house development of ActiveX specifications by the end of October. Microsoft will submit an initial specification, source and binary reference implementations and conformity test suites to the effort. Licensees will have to agree to share any intellectual property pertaining to ActiveX created through the Pre-Structured process. Licensees will be able to modify ActiveX source code to create new reference implementations and ship the resulting binaries; the Open Group will be sole supplier of source code. The initial exercise will make core technologies available; Bell anticipates a cluster of Pre-Stuctured Technology processes will guide the evolution of different ActiveX components. The first meeting of the steering committee – the make-up of which is being chosen entirely by Microsoft – is scheduled for the second week of Novemb er. Microsoft will sell versions of the specifications and says all of the ActiveX technologies it is handing over are now shipping on Windows NT, with Windows95 and Mac implementations in beta test. Software AG and Microsoft have also converted the technologies for SunSoft Inc’s Solaris 2.X, a demonstration version of which is up on the Web. The two expect the Solaris version to be used as the basis for other Unix implementations. Object Group president Chris Stone responded by describing the planned program as a closed group that decides what to build, when, and how much to spend on it. It has nothing to do with standardization. This is like hiring Cambridge Technology Partners to port your product to another platform.
