San Francisco Ð NeXT was conspicuously absent when six major UNIX system developers an-nounced in March they were joining forces to develop a unified UNIX environment that will work across platforms to give users and developers a consistent look and feel. But ongoing negotiations between NeXT and several COSE partners suggest that NeXT may yet cozy up to the alliance, sources reported.
The founding members of the Common Open Software Environment, or COSE, are Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, the Univel subsidiary of Novell, the Santa Cruz Operation, and UNIX Systems Laboratory. Al-though NeXT had been in discussion with "some but not all of the members of the alliance prior to the announcement," said Brett Bachman, director of product marketing at NeXT, the company was not "able to finalize any relationships" in time for the an-nouncement.
Instead, NeXT hopes to work with some of the companies one-on-one and to license them individual parts of NeXTSTEP, Bachman added. "We'd like to make it possible for people to use NeXT distributed-object technology but to make it work in a distributed object environment Ð have distributed objects running on Solaris or NT."
The announcement is widely seen as an attempt by the six companies to present a common front against Microsoft Windows NT. Customers' biggest complaint against UNIX is that there are too many versions, while Windows NT is seen as presenting users with a single interface.
"COSE leaves Windows out, it doesn't leave NeXTSTEP out," said Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems. But he dismissed the idea that COSE would eventually embrace NeXTSTEP. "They can modify their interface to be compliant. We had to change our Open Look interface. Compromises are tough."