Open Software Foundation
Encyclopedia
The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit organization founded in 1988 under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act
of 1984 to create an open standard
for an implementation of the UNIX
operating system.
of Digital Equipment Corporation
at a by-invitation-only meeting hosted by DEC for several UNIX
system vendors (called the "Hamilton Group", since the meeting was held at DEC's offices on Palo Alto's Hamilton Avenue). It was intended as an organization for joint development, mostly in response to a perceived threat of "merged UNIX system" efforts by AT&T
and Sun Microsystems
. The foundation's original sponsoring members were Apollo Computer
, Groupe Bull
, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard
, IBM
, Nixdorf Computer
, and Siemens AG
, sometimes called the "Gang of Seven". Later sponsor members included Philips
and Hitachi
with the broader general membership growing to more than a hundred companies.
The sponsors gave OSF significant funding, a broad mandate (the so-called "Seven Principles"), a fair measure of independence as well as support from sponsor senior management. Senior operational executives from the sponsoring companies served on OSF's initial Board of Directors. One of the Seven Principles was declaration of an "Open Process" whereby OSF staff would create Request for Proposals for source technologies to be selected by OSF, in a vendor neutral process. The selected technology would be licensed by the OSF to the public. Membership in the organization gave member companies a voice in the process for requirements. At the founding, five Open Process projects were named.
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. This led Scott McNealy
of Sun to quip that "OSF" really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever." The competition between the opposing versions of UNIX systems became known as the UNIX wars
. AT&T founded the UNIX International
(UI) project management organization later that year as a counter-response to the OSF. UI was led by Peter Cunningham as its President formerly of ICL. UI had many of the same characteristics of OSF with the exception of a software development staff. Unix System Laboratories
(USL) filled the software development role and UI was based in Parsippany, New Jersey to be close to USL.
The executive staff of the Open Software Foundation included David Tory, President formerly of Computer Associates; Norma Clarke, Vice-President Human Resources formerly of Mitre Corp.; Marty Ford, Vice-President Finance formerly of Digital Equipment Corp.; Ira Goldstein, Vice-President Research Institute formerly of Hewlett-Packard; Roger Gourd, Vice-President Engineering formerly of Digital Equipment Corp.; Alex Morrow, Vice-President Strategy formerly of IBM; Donal O'Shea, Vice-President of Operations formerly of Unisoft Corp. This staff added more than 300 employees in less than two years. The organization's headquarters were at 11 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts
, intentionally located in the neighborhood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
along with remote development offices in Munich, Germany and Grenoble, France as well as field offices in Brussels and Tokyo. To the public the organization appeared to be nothing more than an advocacy group; in reality it included a distributed software development organization.
: the Mach 2.5 microkernel; from IBM, the journaled file system as well as commands and libraries; from SecureWare secure core components; from BSD the networking stack; and a new virtual memory management system invented at OSF. By the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1994, the only major UNIX system vendor using the complete OSF/1 package was Digital, which rebranded it Digital UNIX (later known as Tru64 UNIX
after Digital's acquisition by Compaq
). However other Unix vendors licensed the operating system to include various components of OSF/1 in their products. Other software vendors also licensed OSF/1 including Apple. Parts of OSF/1 were contained in so many versions of Unix it arguably was most widely deployed Unix product ever produced. The OSF/1 copyright appears in the list of technologies used in the iPhone
.
Other technologies developed by OSF include Motif
and Distributed Computing Environment
(DCE), respectively a widget toolkit
and package of distributed network computing technologies. The Motif toolkit was adopted as a formal standard within the IEEE as P1295 in 1994.
Filling out the initial (and what turned out to be final) five technologies from OSF were DME, the Distributed Management Environment and ANDF, the Architecturally Neutral Distribution Format. Technologies which were produced primarily by OSF included ODE, the Open Development Environment - a flexible development, build and source control environment; TET, the Test Environment Toolkit - an open framework for building and executing automated test cases; and the operating system OSF/1 MK from the OSF Research Institute based on the Mach3.0 microkernel. ODE and TET were made available as open source. TET was produced as a result of collaboration between OSF, UNIX International and the X/Open Consortium. All the OSF technologies had corresponding manuals and supporting publications produced almost exclusively by the staff at OSF and published by Prentice-Hall.
in enterprise computing. In May, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative was announced by the major players in the UNIX world from both the UI and OSF camps: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Unix System Laboratories
, and the Santa Cruz Operation. As part of this agreement, Sun and AT&T became OSF sponsor members, OSF submitted Motif to the X/Open
Consortium for certification and branding and Novell passed control and licensing of the UNIX trademark to the X/Open Consortium.
In March 1994, OSF announced its new organizational model as well as introducing the COSE technology model as its Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process which marked the end of OSF as a significant software development company. It also assumed responsibility for future work on the COSE initiative's Common Desktop Environment
(CDE). In September 1995, the merger of OSF/Motif and CDE into a single project, CDE/Motif, was announced.
In February 1996 OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group
.
Despite the similarity in name and the fact that both groups were based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
, there was never any connection between OSF and the Free Software Foundation
, neither is it associated with the technology non-profit Open Software Foundation based in Washington, DC or Open Sysems, Inc.
National Cooperative Research and Production Act
The National Cooperative Research and Production Act is a United States federal law that reduces potential antitrust liabilities of research joint ventures and standards development organizations ....
of 1984 to create an open standard
Open standard
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed . There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage....
for an implementation of the UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
operating system.
History
The organization was first proposed by Armando StettnerArmando Stettner
Armando P Stettner is a computer engineer and architect who is most widely known for spearheading the native VAX version of Unix, Ultrix, during his tenure at Digital Equipment Corporation.-Biography:...
of Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
at a by-invitation-only meeting hosted by DEC for several UNIX
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
system vendors (called the "Hamilton Group", since the meeting was held at DEC's offices on Palo Alto's Hamilton Avenue). It was intended as an organization for joint development, mostly in response to a perceived threat of "merged UNIX system" efforts by AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
and Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
. The foundation's original sponsoring members were Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer
Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s...
, Groupe Bull
Groupe Bull
-External links:* * — Friends, co-workers and former employees of Bull and Honeywell* *...
, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, Nixdorf Computer
Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme
Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme, AG was formed in 1990 by the merger of Nixdorf Computer AG and the Siemens' Data Information Services division...
, and Siemens AG
Siemens AG
Siemens AG is a German multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Munich, Germany. It is the largest Europe-based electronics and electrical engineering company....
, sometimes called the "Gang of Seven". Later sponsor members included Philips
Philips
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....
and Hitachi
Hitachi, Ltd.
is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Marunouchi 1-chome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. The company is the parent of the Hitachi Group as part of the larger DKB Group companies...
with the broader general membership growing to more than a hundred companies.
The sponsors gave OSF significant funding, a broad mandate (the so-called "Seven Principles"), a fair measure of independence as well as support from sponsor senior management. Senior operational executives from the sponsoring companies served on OSF's initial Board of Directors. One of the Seven Principles was declaration of an "Open Process" whereby OSF staff would create Request for Proposals for source technologies to be selected by OSF, in a vendor neutral process. The selected technology would be licensed by the OSF to the public. Membership in the organization gave member companies a voice in the process for requirements. At the founding, five Open Process projects were named.
The organization was seen as a response to the collaboration between AT&T and Sun on UNIX System V
UNIX System V
Unix System V, commonly abbreviated SysV , is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by American Telephone & Telegraph and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, termed Releases 1, 2, 3 and 4...
Release 4, and a fear that other vendors would be locked out of the standardization process. This led Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy
Scott McNealy is an American business executive. He co-founded computer technology company Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim.-Biography:...
of Sun to quip that "OSF" really stood for "Oppose Sun Forever." The competition between the opposing versions of UNIX systems became known as the UNIX wars
Unix wars
The Unix wars were the struggles between vendors of the Unix computer operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s to set the standard for Unix thenceforth.- Origins :...
. AT&T founded the UNIX International
Unix International
Unix International or UI was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the Unix operating system. Its most notable members were AT&T and Sun Microsystems, and in fact the commonly accepted reason for its existence was as a counterbalance to the Open Software Foundation ,...
(UI) project management organization later that year as a counter-response to the OSF. UI was led by Peter Cunningham as its President formerly of ICL. UI had many of the same characteristics of OSF with the exception of a software development staff. Unix System Laboratories
Unix System Laboratories
Unix System Laboratories was originally organized as part of Bell Labs in 1989. USL joined with the UNIX Software Operation, also a Bell Laboratories division, in 1990. It assumed responsibility for Unix development and licensing activities...
(USL) filled the software development role and UI was based in Parsippany, New Jersey to be close to USL.
The executive staff of the Open Software Foundation included David Tory, President formerly of Computer Associates; Norma Clarke, Vice-President Human Resources formerly of Mitre Corp.; Marty Ford, Vice-President Finance formerly of Digital Equipment Corp.; Ira Goldstein, Vice-President Research Institute formerly of Hewlett-Packard; Roger Gourd, Vice-President Engineering formerly of Digital Equipment Corp.; Alex Morrow, Vice-President Strategy formerly of IBM; Donal O'Shea, Vice-President of Operations formerly of Unisoft Corp. This staff added more than 300 employees in less than two years. The organization's headquarters were at 11 Cambridge Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, intentionally located in the neighborhood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
along with remote development offices in Munich, Germany and Grenoble, France as well as field offices in Brussels and Tokyo. To the public the organization appeared to be nothing more than an advocacy group; in reality it included a distributed software development organization.
Products
OSF's UNIX reference implementation was known as "OSF/1" and was first released in December 1991 and adopted by Digital a month later. 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. However, delays and portability concerns caused the OSF staff to shelve the original plan. 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 as well as vendor neutrality. This new OS was produced in a little more than a year's time and incorporated technology from Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....
: the Mach 2.5 microkernel; from IBM, the journaled file system as well as commands and libraries; from SecureWare secure core components; from BSD the networking stack; and a new virtual memory management system invented at OSF. By the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1994, the only major UNIX system vendor using the complete OSF/1 package was Digital, which rebranded it Digital UNIX (later known as Tru64 UNIX
Tru64 UNIX
Tru64 UNIX is a 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture , currently owned by Hewlett-Packard . Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation , where it was known as Digital UNIX .As its original name suggests, Tru64...
after Digital's acquisition by Compaq
Compaq
Compaq Computer Corporation is a personal computer company founded in 1982. Once the largest supplier of personal computing systems in the world, Compaq existed as an independent corporation until 2002, when it was acquired for US$25 billion by Hewlett-Packard....
). However other Unix vendors licensed the operating system to include various components of OSF/1 in their products. Other software vendors also licensed OSF/1 including Apple. Parts of OSF/1 were contained in so many versions of Unix it arguably was most widely deployed Unix product ever produced. The OSF/1 copyright appears in the list of technologies used in the iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
.
Other technologies developed by OSF include Motif
Motif (widget toolkit)
In computing, Motif refers to both a graphical user interface specification and the widget toolkit for building applications that follow that specification under the X Window System on Unix and other POSIX-compliant systems. It emerged in the 1980s as Unix workstations were on the rise, as a...
and Distributed Computing Environment
Distributed Computing Environment
The Distributed Computing Environment is a software system developed in the early 1990s by a consortium that included Apollo Computer , IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others. The DCE supplies a framework and toolkit for developing client/server applications...
(DCE), respectively a widget toolkit
Widget toolkit
In computing, a widget toolkit, widget library, or GUI toolkit is a set of widgets for use in designing applications with graphical user interfaces...
and package of distributed network computing technologies. The Motif toolkit was adopted as a formal standard within the IEEE as P1295 in 1994.
Filling out the initial (and what turned out to be final) five technologies from OSF were DME, the Distributed Management Environment and ANDF, the Architecturally Neutral Distribution Format. Technologies which were produced primarily by OSF included ODE, the Open Development Environment - a flexible development, build and source control environment; TET, the Test Environment Toolkit - an open framework for building and executing automated test cases; and the operating system OSF/1 MK from the OSF Research Institute based on the Mach3.0 microkernel. ODE and TET were made available as open source. TET was produced as a result of collaboration between OSF, UNIX International and the X/Open Consortium. All the OSF technologies had corresponding manuals and supporting publications produced almost exclusively by the staff at OSF and published by Prentice-Hall.
Merger
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 MicrosoftMicrosoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
in enterprise computing. In May, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative was announced by the major players in the UNIX world from both the UI and OSF camps: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, Unix System Laboratories
Unix System Laboratories
Unix System Laboratories was originally organized as part of Bell Labs in 1989. USL joined with the UNIX Software Operation, also a Bell Laboratories division, in 1990. It assumed responsibility for Unix development and licensing activities...
, and the Santa Cruz Operation. As part of this agreement, Sun and AT&T became OSF sponsor members, OSF submitted Motif to the X/Open
X/Open
X/Open Company, Ltd. was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of information technology. More specifically, the original aim was to define a single specification for operating systems derived from UNIX, to...
Consortium for certification and branding and Novell passed control and licensing of the UNIX trademark to the X/Open Consortium.
In March 1994, OSF announced its new organizational model as well as introducing the COSE technology model as its Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process which marked the end of OSF as a significant software development company. It also assumed responsibility for future work on the COSE initiative's Common Desktop Environment
Common Desktop Environment
The Common Desktop Environment is a desktop environment for Unix and OpenVMS, based on the Motif widget toolkit.- Corporate history :...
(CDE). In September 1995, the merger of OSF/Motif and CDE into a single project, CDE/Motif, was announced.
In February 1996 OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group
The Open Group
The Open Group is a vendor and technology-neutral industry consortium, currently with over three hundred member organizations. It was formed in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation...
.
Despite the similarity in name and the fact that both groups were based in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
, there was never any connection between OSF and the Free Software Foundation
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the free software movement, a copyleft-based movement which aims to promote the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software...
, neither is it associated with the technology non-profit Open Software Foundation based in Washington, DC or Open Sysems, Inc.