Lotus Development Corp is the first full member company to join Component Integration Labs Inc, the San Francisco, California-based non-profit industry association formed to support the OpenDoc alternative to Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding. The Lab sponsors are IBM Corp, Apple Computer and Novell Inc’s WordPerfect. Lotus already supports Apple’s Bento technology, the portable object storage library and format for Unix, Windows, OS/2 and Macintosh products, in its current versions of 1-2-3, Improv and Notes, having had a hand in its development. Bento, and IBM’s SOM System Object Model have been licensed to the Labs with the idea of making the technologies more broadly available. Lotus says it is seriously evaluating System Object Model, and will evaluate other parts of OpenDoc as they emerge. Sun Microsystems Inc, Taligent Inc, Xerox Corp and Oracle Corp have all shown interest in the OpenDoc technology.
