Meanwhile the polarisation between the two camps at Unix Expo was more pronounced than ever, with companies proclaiming their allegiances with prominant flags over the booths. On the Open Software Foundation side, demonstrations of OSF/1 were evident on the Groupe Bull, DEC, IBM and Siemens-Nixdorf stands, with the Distributed Computing Environment shown by DEC, HP and IBM. The Motif interface was being shown on over 60 booths at the show. With impatient sponsors looking nervously at their pocket-books and wondering when the thing will become financially self-supporting, the Foundation can’t afford to be as exclusive as Unix International in the Unix Wars – while Peter Cunningham was confidently proclaiming that the battle had already been won, pointing to 750 V.4 products claimed to be shipping already, Tory said that one of the reference implementations of the Distributed Computing Environment was to be a System V.4 machine, acknowledging the fact that the V.4 base will be an important revenue stream for products such as DCE, Motif, and the forthcoming Distributed Management Environment. But Tory said that this shouldn’t detract from the central importance of OSF/1, the migration to which is a long term strategic commitment, and Unix System Labs now has to come to terms with the fact that it is in a competitive situation.
