The latest development in the shadowy saga of the investigation of the Open Software Foundation by the US Federal Trade Commission is that IBM has asked its top law firm, Cravath Swain & Moore, to employ some of its highest ranking talent to to try and find out if there are any anti-trust suits looming against the Foundation. Cravath is thought to believe that any suit does not necessarily have to be brought against the Open Software Foundation per se, but could be launched against any or all of its sponsors, and is worried that IBM could be a target. The Foundation was denying to members last week that there was any investigation, but acknowledges that some independent software vendors may have been informally contacted. Meantime the Open Foundation announced late last week that its OSF/Motif and the Remote Procedure Call from its Dist ributed Computing Environment are included in the specifications of Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp and NTT Data Communications Systems Corp’s Multivendor Integration Arch itecture. Motif is just one of several user interfaces specified.
