As near as we can make out – thanks to the veil of secrecy the Open Software Foundation likes to draw across even the rudimentary working of its Request for Technology process these days, the meetings it has scheduled for April 8 and 11 in the US and Germany, won’t even get around to preliminary review of the Distributed Management Environment submissions it’s currently considering. Instead, the meetings have been called to consider the very scope of the Distributed Management Environment Request for Technology itself. The Foundation has prepared a white paper or Scope Document evidentially based on the results of a questionnaire it circulated among its membership some months ago, whose merits will apparently be debated by those assembled including submitters, consultants, industry analysts and the Foundation’s own Distributed Management Environment technical team. Sources with access to the document say the scope of the Distributed Management Environment Request has been vastly widened since it was first published back in August and now includes a long and perhaps unwieldy checklist of network and management facilities and the framework originally called for. New, for instance, are items such as configuration management as in Kernel devices, file systems, network protocols and Streams, OSF/1 services, accounting error logging, loader, mail printer, user, Distributed Computing Environment services such as naming and time services and authorisation, and management applications such as monitoring and control, distributing printing, distribution licensing services and software distribution. In the document the Foundation itself admits that its members are split into camps of strong and contradictory opinion with vendors wanting to limit the Request for Technology’s scope to only what is necessary, and users demanding management applications. With the basic nature of the Request for Technology thrown open to debate, observers predict the meetings could turn into free-for-all with everyone jockeying for position. An Request for Technology such as the Scope Document suggests would probably also put the Foundation in the position of canonising particular third-party applications at the expense of others.
