We couldn’t help but notice that some of the coverage following whatever it was we were witness to at UniForum referred to it as Unified Unix. Well, it may be a catchy phrase, but what was announced as COSE – Common Open Software Environment – wasn’t Unified Unix – not philosophically, spiritually or literally. Unified Unix, as it turns out, was an entirely different kettle of fish. A month or more before the March 17 announcement, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co were partner-less and trudging around this huge all-encompassing mother of all application programming interfaces that they called Unified Unix – despite Digital Equipment Corp’s recent appropriation of the name – to independent software vendors, trying without success to get their support. It was said to be a soup-to-nuts A-to-Z kind of thing and the software vendors rejected it out of hand as offering them nothing. There was no agreement on the kernel (but then COSE doesn’t specify one either); it wasn’t as desktop-centric as COSE nor as graphical interface-oriented nor as networked. It didn’t pick up specific vendors’ implementations of technologies the way COSE purports to do either. But it was what they meant when they said Unified Unix. Meanwhile, the companies that rushed to endorse COSE after the announcement, such as the database companies, are now trying to figure out what exactly they backed. With COSE being such a last orders affair, they weren’t given much time to consider it when they were asked for support, apparently by Sun Microsystems Inc.
Public relations kits
It all happened just the day before the announcement, and there were all those supporting press releases to write, print and stuff into public relations kits. By the way, if anyone has a complete collection of all the iterations of main press release, we’d love to see how it changed. Unix System Laboratories Inc president Roel Pieper said in a talk with a bunch of software developers that he might license the tag Desktop Unix to his COSE partners but never the unadorned word Unix. Industry watcher Nina Lytton publicly sized up the COSE alliance as the triumph of the obvious. In its March 17 press release, COSE gave as the reason for its existence as increased customer demand for consistent technologies across multiple systems, greater technology choice, increased cost savings and quicker time to market. Goldman Sachs vice-president John Levinson says this statement should actually be read no vendor operating system value-add, commoditisation of hardware and software, faster price reductions and shorter product life cycles. COSE may make a pass at enriching the Motif specification with stuff from Open Look but the effort, if there is one, probably won’t get very far. SunSoft president Ed Zander was probably ill-advised suggesting at the announcement that serious changes would be made. Meanwhile, Unix System Laboratories Inc is probably going to have to make a business decision about whether to buy in Motif from the outside. The COSE people are working on multiple areas beyond the five or six initially outlined at the announcement. They intend to give us some notion of what they are when they roll out the application programming interface in 90 days. COSE prides itself on its un-organisation: no dues, no structure, no consortium, no budget, and it’s hard to reckon how such a motley crew, left to its own devices, can even begin to expect to defeat Bill Gates, master of the media, without a common war chest and a seriously orchestrated propaganda campaign. The game afoot has gone way beyond technology into the realm of perception, where Microsoft Corp holds almost total sway. And what do you suppose the Dutch word for COSE is? We suspect our Dutch-speaking friends Roel Pieper and Wim Roelandts cooked it up. Then Wim went off and tagged IBM and when IBM and Hewlett agreed to support a common position Sun decided it couldn’t resist, especially with Novell Inc nudging it on. Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Univel Inc are only supporters; not key players.
