[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“A new organisation, OpenForum Europe, has been formed
to push the benefits of Open Source software in the UK. But it is
an organisation with something of a past; its moving spirits have
been involved in X/Open, Uniforum UK and its successor Interforum,
and the inaugural OpenForum Council membership list seems to have a
considerable amount in common with the membership of Interforum.
The extent to which these organisations succeeded is a matter of
opinion.According to a prelaunch OpenForum document leaked to The
Register, one objective of the organisation will be to “broaden the
market take up of Open Source Software (OSS) including Linux.” It
also intends to avoid repeating the mistakes that were made over
Unix in the 80s and 90s, but there are some people who think that
organisations such as X/Open and Uniforum bear considerable
responsibility for those very mistakes.Noted Open Source evangelist Eddie Bleasdale of Netproject holds
X/Open responsible, alongside “AT&T lawyers,” for “opening the
spec of Unix so widely that even NT could be called Unix,” and
points to the hideous mess that Unix descended into in the 90s as
reason for serious scepticism about the likely effectiveness of
OpenForum.”