The US National Institute for Standards and Technology, which has now closed the public comment period set for its proposed adoption of the X Window 11.3 software as a Federal Information Processing Standard (CI No 1,257), is currently in the process of analysing responses, understood to include objections from companies such as Sun Microsystems and Unisys Corp. Although X11 has been widely adopted, there is a general feeling amongst the industry that the technology, in particular the Intrinsics toolkit, has not yet reached its full maturity. Objectors favour revising the Standard to take account of the forthcoming X11 Release 4, but this could delay its formal acceptance by up to a year.
