X/Open Co Ltd will be receiving Common Desktop Environment specifications from the Common Open Software Environment firms in four stages over the course of the year. Specifications for stable code, such as the Sun Microsystems Inc ToolTalk messaging system were delivered last month. Open Software Foundation Motif and X Window X11.5 components are expected to be delivered this month. The remainder – and the bulk of COSE’s interface environment – will be submitted in two tranches, in mid-October and mid-Novemeber, to ensure that X/Open’s CDE working group reviewers do not get swamped. Although COSE firms claim anything between 80% and 90% of Common Desktop Environment code already exists, much is not stabilised in terms of how different components of the interface will interact with each other. There is a certain amount of non-trivial integration work to be done and X/Open expects that some pieces of the Common Open Software Environment’s proposed interface will change, so that they don’t look like the original, as they are integrated into the Common Desktop Environment specification.

Branding

The pre-review phase will take until the end of the year to complete. This process, administered by the 18-strong CDE working group – which includes more X/Open shareholders than any other at present – is considering Common Desktop Environment specifications in separate pieces. However, when the process to put CDE on the fast track for X/Open standard branding begins next year – it’s due to be completed by mid-1994 – only a fully-integrated Common Desktop Environment environment will be able to go forward for branding. X/Open’s normal voting procedure will apply here, and out of the 18 members eligible to vote on the fast-track process – not the same 18 that make up the CDE working group, and not all of them shareholders – there must be a 75% majority, or 14 votes, in favour. Before the vote takes place, COSE must put right whatever the X/Open review team finds lacking, and address whatever recommendations X/Open’s User Requirements Group might make to Common Desktop Environment. That may mean anything from replacing something in CDE that fails, or reworking the specification itself to omit words and descriptions that X/Open deems unacceptable for use in a standard specification (which may be fine for a product specification), such as or or might. X/Open admits that it will end up branding what it calls logical components of CDE separately, but only those that users and vendors may require independently of the integrated Common Desktop Environment, such as Motif and X Window. COSE firms are also contracted to fund the process of pre-review and fast-tracking CDE – X/Open says this will be less than the $225,000 quoted in some quarters. X/Open insists that there will be deliverables by the time of the CDE developers conference in October, described as pre-alpha code (but will it be much more than a Motif toolkit?). X/Open believes Common Desktop Environment will succeed by dint of the number of company vice-presidents and other executives that are putting their resources and reputations behind the effort.

By William Fellows

However, others observe that many also lent their support to the failed Advanced Computing Environment initiative. Moreover, Novell Inc’s position in COSE via its Unix System Laboratories Inc and Univel Inc units looks anything but secure – some say that it will retreat from the thing altogether, although other events seem to have superseded that eventuality. Other imponderables include who is actually going to build a CDE version of Motif. The way X/Open regards Common Desktop Environment is similar to, if not the same as, COSE’s positioning of its interface environment. Its just that the COSE firms are shy of describing publicly what they fully intend CDE to become: namely an interface with a bundled application and services environment that can compete directly with Windows and Windows NT front-ends. Windows includes an integrated application set. At the moment, Unix interfaces don’t, and that’s

what COSE is trying to build. People see Motif as stand-alone, therefore it is different in its acceptability vis a vis Windows, says X/Open. In X/Open’s view, COSE is being very careful not to publicise the fact that it is either trying to catch up or compete directly with Windows, because of the negative perception of Common Desktop Environment that this would create. X/Open thinks the scepticism with which sections of the user community have greeted COSE is the result, to some extent, of COSE appearing to be doing little more – where CDE is concerned – than coalescing or normalising what is already there, like X Window, Motif, ToolTalk and so on. The involvement of X/Open and its expected standardisation on Common Desktop Environment is therefore not nearly as important to users as it is to vendors, although there are obviously separate agendas at work.

Battle royal

While users have been calling – unsuccessfully – for X/Open to adopt an interface standard for the last four years, most have gone off and adopted fairly standard front-end technologies in the meantime, such as Motif, X Window and one of the several desktop managers on offer. The vendors, on the other hand, have been engaged in a battle royal to establish their respective interface technologies and have obviously been unwilling – given the amount of resources spent on development and marketing – to concede to any compromise position, let alone defeat. It has, in X/Open’s view, taken the surrender of Sun Microsystems Inc with its Open Look interface to the combined forces of Motif, to bring about the possibility of a standard interface environment for Unix. In turn, X/Open – supposedly champion of users’ requirements – defends its inability to have acted on the issue until now, saying that by the time it was called on to look at what standardisation could be achieved in the area, vendors were already too far differentiated and entrenched in their positions to bring about consensus and agreement needed for standards-setting. It claims it knew long ago – and it uses a graph depicting the development, marketing and adoption of the technologies to show how – that it wouldn’t be able to settle the interface issue until the positions of the vendors had moved beyond differentiated development and the battle for hearts and minds had been won or lost. Moreover, given that the main players in the market were, and still are, vote-casting X/Open members, a majority decision on any one of the interface options would have been impossible to achieve. After all this, users understandably remain sceptical: only the final delivery of a Common Desktop Environment product will reassure them, believes X/Open.