THE UNIX wars spilled over to Hongkong last week, with the launch of two initiatives that will increase competition over technical standards between the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and UNIX International (UI).
Both organisations spout the gospel of UNIX and ''open'' standards as the only road to true inter-operability between competing hardware platforms.
But the problem is that both point to a different set of technical standards to get there.
Since the two groups were formed in 1988, both have campaigned heavily to sell their particular type of the UNIX operating system.
The battles have primarily been fought in the United States. Asian operations of member companies have simply picked up the standards - and the marketing hype - that have already been established.
Now, with Asia boasting the world's most active markets, OSF and UI are increasingly pitching the message directly at the region - both to users and to software developers.
