Asked to comment on whether it would now try and settle with Addamax Corp following the judge’s denial of a motion for summary judgement sought by the Open Software Foundation, Hewlett-Packard Co and Digital Equipment Corp to get the anti-trust suit thrown out of court, Software Foundation vice-president, sales and marketing Peter Shaw replied We do not comment on ongoing legal action so I have nothing to say. We’ve just had one motion turned down in court. Is that really worth two pages of copy? The suit looks increasingly irrelevant now that now further development is being done on the OSF/1 operating system, but the burden of it is that Addamax claims that the choice of SecureWare over its own trusted system security product for OSF/1 represented anticompetitive behaviour, but the assertion that if one security system was favoured over another, the developer of the other would be driven out of the market looks irrelevant as things have turned out. With IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard sponsoring the Software Foundation, it looked at one time as if OSF/1 would become the dominant Unix. Pause for hollow laughter.
