News comes this week that AT&T Co supporters club Unix International Inc has been covertly harbouring two additional members for some time now – the two being founder members of rival organisation the Open Software Foundation (CI No 1,472). Sources say that one is Hitachi Ltd – which has had a foot in the Unix International camp for some time – and that the other may be Siemens AG – Siemens has strong links with AT&T via its involvement in the telecommunications business. Such defections would leave the rest of the Foundation founders – IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard Co and Bull SA together with the sleeping Dutchman Philips NV – trying to hold back the Unix floodgates, like King Canute’s ill-fated attempt to stop the rising tide. Siemens is not only irked enough with Foundation’s move to Mach for its operating system technology that it’s expected to offer AT&T’s System V.4 instead of OSF/1 on its forthcoming Intel iAPX-86-based MX boxes; it’s also covering its Distributed Computing Environment bets as well and is understood to have now aggressively initiated talks with Netwise Inc, a company with which it previously had no truck, for its Remote Procedure Call technology. Word is that the current Siemens strategy allows for offering both the Foundation’s Environment technology, when it comes, and the opposing Sun Microsystems-Netwise alternative rejected by the Foundation.
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