Today, The Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) announced the purchase of Building Systems Design (BSD). See http://www.csinet.org/bsdpr for the press release.
This means that CSI now owns a master specification product, Speclink. This is the first commercial construction specification system CSI has owned. CSI traditionally has concentrated on developing formats used for organizing construction data rather than software and text to produce construction specifications.
What this will mean for CSI's relationship with the other commercial master specification systems, The Construction Sciences Research Foundation's (CSRF) SPECTEXT and ARCOM's MasterSpec, remains to be seen. BSD, CSRF, and ARCOM were partners with CSI to help promote use of CSI formats. Now CSI, CSRF, and ARCOM are competitors.
David Stutzman