Open Software Foundation

[2] Despite the similarities in name, OSF was unrelated to the Free Software Foundation (FSF, also based in Cambridge, Massachusetts), or the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

[3] It was intended as an organization for joint development, mostly in response to a perceived threat of "merged UNIX system" efforts by AT&T Corporation and Sun Microsystems.

After discussion during the meeting, the proposal was tabled so that members of the Hamilton Group could broach the idea of a joint development effort with Sun and AT&T.

That charter was formally presented to Apollo, HP, IBM and others after Sun and AT&T rejected the overture by the Hamilton Group members.

Later sponsor members included Philips and Hitachi with the broader general membership growing to more than a hundred companies.

Senior operating executives from the sponsoring companies served on OSF's initial Board of Directors.

The organization was seen as a response to the collaboration between AT&T and Sun on UNIX System V Release 4, and a fear that other vendors would be locked out of the standardization process.

[13] As part of the founding of the organization, the AIX operating system was provided by IBM and was intended to be passed-through to the member companies of OSF.

Instead, a new Unix reference operating system using components from across the industry would be released on a wide range of platforms to demonstrate its portability and vendor neutrality.

It incorporated technology from Carnegie Mellon University: the Mach 2.5 microkernel; from IBM, the journaled file system and commands and libraries; from SecureWare secure core components; from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) the computer networking stack; and a new virtual memory management system invented at OSF.

[16] By 1993, it had become clear that the greater threat to UNIX system vendors was not each other as much as the increasing presence of Microsoft in enterprise computing.