Two European manufactures will announce Mac OS licensing deals soon, according to a normally reliable source at Motorola Inc. One of the deals is signed, sealed and only awaiting the end of the industry’s summer doldrums to be announced – expect it in two or three weeks. The other is a little further away, said the Motorola-ite. He’s not giving anything else away, but the smart money has got to be on at least one German company: Vobis AG for one has been sniffing around the idea of building Common Hardware Reference Platform machines for a while. Peacock AG is another possible. And don’t forget Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA; could it finally be doing something serious with its stake in Power Computing Corp? Meanwhile Electrical Engineering Times reports that the Taiwan New PC Consortium’s members have taken the bit between their teeth and are building Macintosh clones, which they hope to show at Comdex/Fall in Las Vegas this November. The only trouble is, the paper said, that Mac OS licensing has yet to be finalised. The Taiwanese government’s Computer & Communication Research Laboratories, which co-ordinates the consortium, is lobbying hard for two or three firms to be allowed to ship the machines.
