The two Unix bodies have learned their lesson from the bitter experience with the Common Desktop Environment, and X/Open Co Ltd and the Open Software Foundation are expected to work jointly on ‘single-image’ projects in future. Their unspecified future initiatives will be co-ordinated in such a way that from the outset the two will be able to say exactly who is doing what, when, where, and, more to the point, how much it will cost and who is going to pay. Requirements, specification, definition and product development are expected to proceed in a much more symbiotic fashion. Common Desktop was driven by the loose Common Open Software Environment organisation and delivered low-quality specification work, according to X/Open. It was the catalyst for, and was eventually rescued by, the new look Software Foundation and its Pre-Structured Technology process at the beginning of 1994. The hiring of the IEEE’s guru Hal Jepperson helped manage it. The new X/Open-Open Software Foundation relationship is not exclusive: they will both pursue other projects separately. Under the plan to work more closely together, the two are currently looking at the information they get from their requirements feedback processes in order to establish if those tasks can be merged to save time and resources. Their distinct requirement definition processes, X/Open’s from business and the Software Foundation’s from the industry, will be retained. X/Open says it is no longer interested in desktop issues such as common graphical user interface and Windows interoperability and has no plans for a Windows applications programming interface of any kind, quoting ‘the industry’ which has told it that Windows can not be bettered. It is more concerned with the creation of specifications for data structures that will be able to deliver common information services across a range of systems, everything from television sets to Personal Digital Assistants, personal computers and Unix machines.
