While there is now, at least in public, one initiative underway which could eventually lead to much of the bitter rivalry between Unix International Inc and the Open Software Foundation being laid to rest, the industry, it seems, will have to wait longer than the Hannover Fair later this month to breath its collective sigh of relief. Far from being just a furlong out, the latest peace effort – now being billed by some as Unity II, son of the original Unity peace talks that stalled two years ago – is now just about coming under starter’s orders. Although Unix International president Peter Cunningham duly delivered his clarion call for peace in our time at last week’s members meeting in San Diego, and re-iterated Unix International’s traditional view of itself, Open Software Foundation chief David Tory says he is still awaiting Unix International’s promised set of proposals for Unity II to arrive on his desk. Nevertheless, a window of opportunity certainly exists, and the prospects for concluding a negotiated peace settlement are good: even Tory concedes that there is room for manoeuvre. There is no real conflict between what Unix International and the Open Software Foundation does… and there is value in Unix International and the Foundation getting together, but only on very specific terms, he told our sister paper Unigram.X last week. But, and it is a but as old as the hills, there is a political problem. For a start, Unix International has one definition of open systems and the Foundation has another, says Tory. Furthermore, he is adamant that before any Unity II talks can begin, there has to be basic agreement on what Unix International and the Foundation are. Unix International, Tory says, has a model of the Foundation, and it is the wrong model. Unix International has to accept that the Foundation is an industry-funded research and development organisation. We are not Unix-centric like they are. The Foundation is committed to interoperability, between all systems, MVS, VMS and V.4 alike. Unix International, he maintains, is paid for by System V.4 licensees. It is supposed to represent a collective viewpoint to Unix System Labs about what to put in System V.4. And to market System V.4. That’s its charter. But Unix International is trying to drive the Unix system suppliers, and it can’t anymore, because Unix Labs is independent. So it is trying to broaden its effort. But at the same time it still says you must have Unix System V.4, Tuxedo, Atlas and so forth. That restricts what users can implement. It is Unix International’s principle members, voting through their wallets, that will fuel any fire for change, Tory believes. It’s up to them to decide in what direction it goes. Unix International will continue to follow its own way as long as it continues to be funded, he says, darkly. There is also, in the Foundation’s eyes, the sticky issue of Unix International, Unix Labs and its Distributed Computing Environment technology which would have to be resolved before we could come together. Unix International endorsed DCE as the fundamental technology for interoperability in its distributed vision of the future, Atlas, back in September last year.
Nothing like DCE
Since then, Tory says, Atlas has been presented to look nothing like DCE. Moreover, Unix International has confused the industry about what interoperability is. It has suggested that Atlas is a completely different development from DCE, yet everyone knows Unix Labs is taking on DCE and that it is the basis of Atlas. The negotiations with Unix Labs over licensing terms for DCE are still proceeding and promisingly, the two have a very clean, non-political relationship, according to Tory. However, the Foundation and Unix Labs are, by nature, very different organisations, with different aims and agendas: and that’s why the original Unity talks would never have worked, he declared firmly. Contrary to its reportedly entrenched political position on any kind of peace settlement in the Unix industry, Nick Temple, general manager and chief ex
ecutive officer of IBM UK, told Unigram.X during last week’s IBM ’92 show at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre, that any possibility of Unix International and the Open Software Foundation coming together in some form would make a huge amount of sense, if it would further standardisation within the industry. He said that IBM hadn’t really had the understanding of open systems in the past – but we do now.
