Open Software Foundation

Founded in 1988 to develop an open, interoperable standard for UNIX operating systems. The group, consisting initially of all but two major players in the UNIX market, included IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Hewlett Packard, Apollo, Groupe Bull, Siemens, and Nixdorf. The Foundation was largely seen to be an attempt to unify forces against Sun Microsystems and American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and their System V version of UNIX. The competition between the coalition of seven and the pair consisting of Sun Microsystems and AT&T became known as the UNIX wars. Commercially, the developed standard was a failure. The only implementation was OSF/1 by DEC, which was later renamed Digital UNIX. In 1996, OSF merged with X/Open to form the Open Group. The OSF is frequently confused with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but there has never been a connection between OSF and FSF.

See Also: Free Software Foundation; UNIX.