Creation of a much-anticipated Active Group PST Pre-Structured Technology initiative was finally approved by Open Group board members meeting in Rome last Friday. However, focused exclusively as it is on integrating Microsoft Corp’s so-called ActiveX core technologies with security services used by the Open Group’s DCE Distributed Computing Environment software, this PST falls some way short of what back in October was being countenanced by some as an opportunity for other parts of the industry to influence the shape of future ActiveX specifications and perhaps foster integration with other object technology models such as Object Management Group’s Corba. By last month these aspirations had dwindled to the replacement of the Microsoft RPC Remote Procedure Call in ActiveX with the DCE RPC with Microsoft extensions. In fact Open Group board members we spoke to say that for all the ActiveX spin it’ll put on Active Group, there’s in fact little to the current PST but tying DCOM servers to DCE servers, hardly the biggest game in town given how much DCOM server is actually out there yet. The real enchilada is all about accessing Microsoft DCOM desktops from Corba and DCE servers. That’s the version of the PST that IBM Corp re-wrote from scratch last week when it realised the paucity of what was on offer from Microsoft and which will be the subject of a following PST submission, though we don’t know when. Where that will leave OMG, whose best efforts to tie Corba to DCOM have as yet come to nought, is unclear. While Open Group swears key issues such as licensing and a brand name aren’t issues as those are things aren’t part of the PST process and are deemed anti-trust in any case, IBM says there’s nevertheless an unanswered question whether Microsoft will actually license anything back from the PST for inclusion in its products at all. Even Open Group claims there’s stuff that Microsoft wanted included in the PST which has been left on the floor. Open Group is unwilling to talk publicly about any of the PST work until it gets approval from the five or six companies that will fund the first PST, which maybe another couple of days’ time. Digital Equipment Corp is supposedly one of the PST’s key motivators. Open Group said the vote of its board members, which includes the likes of DEC, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems plus several Japanese vendors, was unanimous, though we don’t know how many members, if any, abstained.
