Maybe it won’t be the $100m Addamax Inc lawsuit of the Federal Trade Commission investigation that kicks the stilts out from under the Open Software Foundation: maybe it’ll be one of its prestigious founders instead. At least that’s what they were supposing in some quarters of the industry last week. Word is that at the Advanced Computing Environment Architectural Review meeting in San Jose, little lightbulbs were suddenly going off in a lot of heads. It’s amazing how many ACE founders and big-wig members hadn’t realised or understood the implications of the consortium’s Open Desktop version of OSF/1 being binary-compatible with Digital Equipment Corp’s Ultrix – or what a potential coup it is for DEC – provided that the ACE effort is successful. Now it looks as if DEC’s OSF/1 edition has a clear run at coming out the de facto OSF/1 standard. So how are IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co going to react? Are they going to keep pouring financial and personnel resources into the Open Software Foundation? Not likely, people are saying, betting that the pull-out is about to happen. Also, they say, you’ve got to remember DEC doesn’t want to be in the hardware business in a big way any more – there’s no money in it these days. Instead it wants to turn itself into something that looks like the Excel side of Microsoft Corp, doing network integration, software integration and applications. – Maureen O’Gara
