The US government is investigating the Open Software Foundation for possible antitrust violations, specifically looking into the consortium’s vaunted Request For Technology process for acquiring technology. Lawyers at the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition Litigation are seeking interviews with third-party software vendors that may have been adversely affected by the Foundation’s business practices, looking for evidence of violations of US antitrust law. It is not yet clear whose complaints instigated the non-public investigation or how many independent software vendors and other firms are being approached. The investigators are telling third parties that all information and documents voluntarily provided to the investigation, including the identity of the informants, will be treated confidentially, and are even exempt for disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The government investigation comes amidst mounting industry reports that at least one disaffected software company is preparing to launch antitrust litigation against the Foundation. Sources close to IBM, the most high profile of the Foundation’s famous founders and the company most sensitive to antitrust charges, report that IBM legal counsel has cautioned IBM executives to modify the company’s relationship with the Foundation. IBM lawyers are said to have recommended that joint technology submissions by Foundation sponsors to the Request for Technology process should be curtailed, in part to minimise exposure if Foundation technology is legally encumbered. Such a position could jeopardise the joint IBM-Hewlett-Packard submission of a single network management applications programming interface in response to the Request for Distributed Management Environment technology, one of its latest and still undecided Requests.Criticism of the Request procedures, business terms and conditions and technology selections began to surface last March when a group of 13 software companies, concerned with their continued viability, met in California to discuss among themselves how to deal with an entity as powerful as the Foundation. At the meeting, it was alleged that the Foundation offered software developers less than fair market value for their technology, priced finished product below market value as a competitive hedge and ultimately threatened the very existence of a software industry (CI No 1,392). The group decided to petition the Foundation to adopt a business model for acquiring technology that is economically viable to end users, the Foundation and technology providers. Since then, however, the alternative Unix club has done little to change the way it operates. Software developers continue to be disaffected by the proportion of technology that comes from sponsors, and the amount of money that it pays for the technology adopted.
