Although treated as a closely guarded secret, writes Maureen O’Gara, it seems that the date the Open Software Foundation has picked to announce its vaunted long-awaited and divisive OSF/1 operating system is Tuesday, October 23. The Open Software Foundation is staging the event out of New York, a venue it hasn’t used since the launch of the Foundation itself. Doubtless we can expect quite a to do, and for the Other Side to try and steal some of the thunder now that the date is out fo the bag. The Foundation is expected to say that it will start delivering OSF/1 in November. Let’s hope they’ve worked out how to pay the bill for such affairs, because the original launch reportedly cost $1.5m and took a year to pay back, there were no billback schemes in place and nobody, especially Hewlett-Packard who orchestrated it all, wanted to get stuck with it. Meanwhile the Foundation’s Architecture-Neutral Distribution Format project enters its testing phase this week. Results are expected to be announced in December.
