On August 18, at the Tokyo announcement of the agreement that X/Open Co Ltd would adopt the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Communications Environment as part of X/Open’s Common Applications Environment (CI No 1,984), Dr Rob Morel, managing director of OSF Pacific, said that the agreement represented industry-wide endorsement of the Distributed Environment as the de facto standard for multivendor interoperability. The fact that the specification would be adopted in its entirety and unchanged marked DCE’s formal acceptance by the industry. Morel emphasised that the Software Foundation will remain the owner of the DCE specifications. He said he expected the agreement to spark new efforts in the standardisation field, as many working groups were waiting to see the outcome of the Foundation and X/Open agreement. Always upbeat, he said that the Foundation was looking forward to new relationships with X/Open members, including Sun Microsystems Inc and other companies; already all the X/Open members had contacted the Foundation and were in the process of signing agreements. For his part, defending the Open Software Foundation despite the fact that it resigned its membership of the standards organisation in December last year, George Shaffner, chief operating officer of X/Open, said that there was never a full divorce, rather the two organisations were in frequent contact, and the relationship could grow even closer in the future, extending beyond specifications and on to test suites, which are priced 20 to 30 times higher.
