Although we have been assured at the highest levels that X/Open Co Ltd and Open Software Foundation have shelved any notion of a merger, acquisition or any form of union for the foreseeable future, we have been caught up in a swirl of undercurrents from lower down in the ranks that suggest that joint initiatives would serve the organisations’ customers more quickly. Their concerns stem from Microsoft Corp’s time-to-market for specifications and technologies as well as the economy of maintaining duplicated processes as reasons. Digital Equipment Corp, for instance, estimates it costs up to $5m a year to maintain seats on both boards and participate in all of the relevant technology and specifications processes. X/Open is now engaged at looking into how best to eliminate redundancy between its and the Software Foundation’s processes, and how to expand its services to be able to reduce further its shareholder’s contributions, curently some 50% of its overall funding. X/Open has 55 employees, 37 of them in the UK. The Software Foundation has between 160 and 170 plus engineers on secondment.
