The Open Software Foundation is on the threshold of issuing its next Request for Technology – this time for Distributed System Management – and the team it puts together to evaluate the technology submitted may be headquartered in its Munich office. It would be the first time that the Foundation had conducted an Request for Technology out of Europe. Open Software Foundation business manager Jonathan Gossels, who is responsible for the Request for Technology as he was for the alternative Unix club’s Distributed Computing Environment search, says it’s because so much of this kind of technology resides in Europe. He noted that over half of the companies sitting on the consortium’s System Management Special Interest Group are European-based. Gossels figures the Foundation is at most four to six weeks away from issuing the Request for Technology, delayed mostly by the quaint old-fashioned summer holiday schedule in Europe. The content, he said, is just about done. The member companies have been making their recommendations over the last year and now it’s up to the Foundation to pull together a core evaluation team; submitters will have about 60 days after the Request for Technology comes out to make their preliminary submissions. Gossels estimates the response could be a whopper, with the number of submissions surpassing anything the Foundation has seen yet. As a point of comparison there were 50 initial submissions to the Distributed Computing Request for Technology. Gossels added that if companies found it impossible to travel to Europe for the evaluation proceedings they will probably be allowed to make their presentations at the Foundation headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.