The Open Software Foundation is preparing to make the decision on the technologies that will make up the Distributed Computing Environment portion of OSF/1 – a prospect that is causing anxiety amongst the contenders ahead of the announcement, scheduled for May 15 at the Foundation members’ meeting in Boston. Clearly worried that the Foundation would favour its membership and choose the Hewlett-Packard-Apollo Network Computing System remote procedure call over Sun’s Network File System, Sun was moved last week to write a letter to Foundation members urging them to unite the industry behind a common platform for distributed computing, based around the widely used Sun Open Network Computing architecture. The letter, signed by Sun general systems group vice president Eric Schmidt, pointed out that Open Network Computing is already included as a standard part of System V Release 4, and that choosing it would spur the development of distributed applications. Rick Corbin from Hewlett-Packard called the letter a matter of half-truths favourable to Sun’s side.
