The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was an organization founded in 1988 to create an open standard for an implementation of the Unix operating system. The foundation s original members were Apollo Computers, Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme, and Siemens AG, sometimes called the Gang of Seven . Later members included Philips and Hitachi, Ltd..

The founding of the organization was largely seen as a response to the collaboration between AT&T and Sun Microsystems 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 became known as the Unix wars. AT&T founded the UNIX International organization as a counter-response to the OSF.

OSF s standard Unix implementation was known as OSF/1 and was first released in 1990. For the most part, it was a failure; by the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1994, the only vendor using OSF/1 was DEC, who rebranded it Digital UNIX.

Other well-known standards developed by OSF include Motif (widget toolkit) and the Common Desktop Environment, respectively a widget toolkit and desktop environment for the X Window System.

In 1996 OSF merged with the X/Open Company 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.

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