The Object Management Group has finally issued its Request For Information to solicit documentation of object-oriented technologies in the area of Object Services: this may sound innocuous but those that followed the twists and turns of the Request for the Object Request Broker are probably in for a political tale of equally epic proportions – a foretaste of the battles to come can be savoured if one ponders the fact that Philippe Kahn and Bill Gates will have to come to some kind of compromise in product areas such as ObjectWindows and technology areas covering Object Linking and Embedding; the saga becomes even more intriguing when one mulls over another aspect to the contest, which is that the plucky Object Group team has decided to ensure it is open to allcomers, including some tiny object-oriented companies with innovative technology, by decreeing that the end proposal will be a standard model to which current commercial class libraries can be upgraded.
