Digital Equipment Corp now believes that the Common Open Software Environment crowd really want it to join them, something that it was not quite sure about a few weeks ago. One of the reasons it thinks that COSE is interested in its participation is that it has some key technology that in typical DEC fashion, it has failed to trumpet. The technology in question is ACAS, the Application Control Architecture Service. It’s an object-oriented Object Management Group Common Object Request Broker Architecture-compliant application integration scheme that DEC already has running on Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp machines as well as its own Alpha RISC. It estimates that ACAS could accelerate the schedule COSE’s been kicking around by about a year. DEC won’t get cozy with COSE until it sorts out the all-important process of how things work and get selected, something COSE is believed to be finalising. DEC says that COSE is apparently not going to require participating companies to adopt its whole technology package, even though that would run the risk of watering down its whole purpose.
