fbpx
Wikipedia

Open Software Foundation

January 01, 1970

Not to be confused with Open Source Initiative or Free Software Foundation.

The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988[1] and merged with X/Open in 1996, to become The Open Group.[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).

History edit

The organization was first proposed by Armando Stettner of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) at an invitation-only meeting hosted by DEC for several Unix system vendors in January 1988 (called the "Hamilton Group", since the meeting was held at DEC's offices on Palo Alto's Hamilton Avenue).[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. In the meantime, Stettner was asked to write an organization charter. That charter was formally presented to Apollo, HP, IBM and others after Sun and AT&T rejected the overture by the Hamilton Group members.

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.[4][5] It was registered under the U.S. National Cooperative Research Act of 1984,[6] which reduces potential antitrust liabilities of research joint ventures and standards development organizations.

The sponsors gave OSF significant funding, a broad mandate (the so-called "Seven Principles"), substantial independence, and support from sponsor senior management. Senior operating 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".[7] 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, formerly of International Computers Limited (ICL), as its president. 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-Troy Hills, New Jersey to be close to USL.

The executive staff of the Open Software Foundation included David Tory, President, formerly of Computer Associates; [8] Norma Clarke, Vice-President Human Resources formerly of Mitre; Marty Ford, Vice-President Finance, formerly of DEC; Ira Goldstein, Vice-President Research Institute, formerly of Hewlett-Packard; Roger Gourd, Vice-President Engineering, formerly of DEC; Alex Morrow, Vice-President Strategy, formerly of IBM; Donal O'Shea, Vice-President of Operations, formerly of UniSoft. 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 and 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.

An independent security software company - Addamax, filed suit in 1990 against OSF and its sponsors charging that OSF was engaged in anticompetitive practices. The court delivered a grant of summary judgment to OSF (152 F.3d 48, 50 (1st Cir.1998). [9] In a related action in 1991, the Federal Trade Commission investigated OSF for allegedly using "unfair trade practices" in its "process for acquiring technology."[10][11]

Products edit

 
Open Software Foundation OSF/1 Release Letter December 7, 1990

OSF's Unix reference implementation was named OSF/1. It was first released in December 1990[12] and adopted by Digital a month later.[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. However, delays and portability concerns caused the OSF staff to cancel 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 and vendor neutrality. This new OS was produced in a little more than one year. 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. By the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1996, the only major Unix system vendor using the complete OSF/1 package was Digital (DEC), which rebranded it Digital UNIX (later renamed 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 that it may have been the most widely deployed Unix product ever produced.

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 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as P1295 in 1994.[14]

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;[15] 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. IBM has published its version of ODE on GitHub.[16]

Merger edit

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. 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 and introduced the COSE technology model as its Pre-Structured Technology (PST) process, which marked the end of OSF as a significant software development company.[17] 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.[18]

In February 1996 OSF merged with X/Open to become The Open Group.

References edit

  1. ^ "New Foundation to Advance Software Standards, Develop and Provide Open Software Environment" (Press release). Open Software Foundation. May 17, 1988. Retrieved 2007-07-31.
  2. ^ "X/Open and OSF Join to Create The Open Group". tech-insider.org. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  3. ^ Marshall, Martin (June 20, 1988). "Apollo VP Gives Inside Look at OSF Formation". InfoWorld. p. 33. Retrieved 2011-04-13.
  4. ^ "New Foundation to Advance Software Standards, Develop and Provide Open Software Environment". tech-insider.org. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  5. ^ "Philips Newest Sponsor For Open Software Foundation". tech-insider.org. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  6. ^ . First Circuit Court of Appeals. September 4, 1998. Archived from the original on June 13, 2011. Retrieved 2009-07-19.
  7. ^ Southwick, Karen (1999). High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems. John Wiley & Sons. p. 76. ISBN 978-0-471-29713-0.
  8. ^ "Network World Industry Update" (Press release). Network World. November 21, 1988. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  9. ^ "ADDAMAX CORP. v. OPEN SOFTWARE FOUNDATION, INC". Leagale. September 4, 1998. Retrieved 2020-12-08.
  10. ^ Heichler, Elizabeth (February 4, 1991). "OSF probed by feds; unfair trade alleged". Digital News ("The Newspaper for VAX System Management"). pp. 1, 6.
  11. ^ "Are Open Software's Standards Shutting Out Competitors?". Bloomberg. May 12, 1991. The OSF, in fact, has confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating it
  12. ^ "Open Software Foundation releases OSF/1 operating system, offering customers powerful function, industry standards". tech-insider.org. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  13. ^ "Digital Delivers on the Open Advantage Promise of OSF/1 and DCE" (Press release). Digital Equipment Corporation. January 22, 1992. Retrieved 2007-07-18.
  14. ^ Smeloff, Jane (17 January 1994). "OSF Flash – Motif an IEEE Standard". Open Software Foundation. Retrieved 2 September 2013.
  15. ^ "TET History". The OpenGroup. July 12, 1996. Retrieved 2009-07-18.
  16. ^ Ward, Chris (tjcw). "OSF Open Development Environment as modified by IBM". GitHub. Retrieved October 8, 2020.
  17. ^ "Leading Vendors Unify to Accelerate Open Systems" (Press release). AT&T Global Information Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Corporation, SunSoft Incorporated, et al. March 23, 1994. Retrieved 2007-07-18.
  18. ^ "OSF Announces Formal Launch of CDE/Motif Project" (Press release). Open Software Foundation. September 7, 1995. Retrieved 2007-07-18.

January 01, 1970
open, software, foundation, confused, with, open, source, initiative, free, software, foundation, profit, industry, consortium, creating, open, standard, implementation, operating, system, unix, formed, 1988, merged, with, open, 1996, become, open, group, desp. Not to be confused with Open Source Initiative or Free Software Foundation The Open Software Foundation OSF was a not for profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix It was formed in 1988 1 and merged with X Open in 1996 to become The Open Group 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 Contents 1 History 2 Products 3 Merger 4 ReferencesHistory editThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Open Software Foundation news newspapers books scholar JSTOR January 2014 Learn how and when to remove this message The organization was first proposed by Armando Stettner of Digital Equipment Corporation DEC at an invitation only meeting hosted by DEC for several Unix system vendors in January 1988 called the Hamilton Group since the meeting was held at DEC s offices on Palo Alto s Hamilton Avenue 3 It was intended as an organization for joint development mostly in response to a perceived threat of merged UNIX system efforts by AT amp 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 amp T In the meantime Stettner was asked to write an organization charter That charter was formally presented to Apollo HP IBM and others after Sun and AT amp T rejected the overture by the Hamilton Group members 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 4 5 It was registered under the U S National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 6 which reduces potential antitrust liabilities of research joint ventures and standards development organizations The sponsors gave OSF significant funding a broad mandate the so called Seven Principles substantial independence and support from sponsor senior management Senior operating 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 amp 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 7 The competition between the opposing versions of Unix systems became known as the Unix wars AT amp 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 formerly of International Computers Limited ICL as its president 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 Troy Hills New Jersey to be close to USL The executive staff of the Open Software Foundation included David Tory President formerly of Computer Associates 8 Norma Clarke Vice President Human Resources formerly of Mitre Marty Ford Vice President Finance formerly of DEC Ira Goldstein Vice President Research Institute formerly of Hewlett Packard Roger Gourd Vice President Engineering formerly of DEC Alex Morrow Vice President Strategy formerly of IBM Donal O Shea Vice President of Operations formerly of UniSoft 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 and 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 An independent security software company Addamax filed suit in 1990 against OSF and its sponsors charging that OSF was engaged in anticompetitive practices The court delivered a grant of summary judgment to OSF 152 F 3d 48 50 1st Cir 1998 9 In a related action in 1991 the Federal Trade Commission investigated OSF for allegedly using unfair trade practices in its process for acquiring technology 10 11 Products edit nbsp Open Software Foundation OSF 1 Release Letter December 7 1990OSF s Unix reference implementation was named OSF 1 It was first released in December 1990 12 and adopted by Digital a month later 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 However delays and portability concerns caused the OSF staff to cancel 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 and vendor neutrality This new OS was produced in a little more than one year 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 By the time OSF stopped development of OSF 1 in 1996 the only major Unix system vendor using the complete OSF 1 package was Digital DEC which rebranded it Digital UNIX later renamed 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 that it may have been the most widely deployed Unix product ever produced 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 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE as P1295 in 1994 14 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 15 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 IBM has published its version of ODE on GitHub 16 Merger editBy 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 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 amp 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 and introduced the COSE technology model as its Pre Structured Technology PST process which marked the end of OSF as a significant software development company 17 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 18 In February 1996 OSF merged with X Open to become The Open Group References edit New Foundation to Advance Software Standards Develop and Provide Open Software Environment Press release Open Software Foundation May 17 1988 Retrieved 2007 07 31 X Open and OSF Join to Create The Open Group tech insider org Retrieved 2018 12 04 Marshall Martin June 20 1988 Apollo VP Gives Inside Look at OSF Formation InfoWorld p 33 Retrieved 2011 04 13 New Foundation to Advance Software Standards Develop and Provide Open Software Environment tech insider org Retrieved 2018 12 04 Philips Newest Sponsor For Open Software Foundation tech insider org Retrieved 2018 12 04 First Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion 97 1807 01A First Circuit Court of Appeals September 4 1998 Archived from the original on June 13 2011 Retrieved 2009 07 19 Southwick Karen 1999 High Noon The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems John Wiley amp Sons p 76 ISBN 978 0 471 29713 0 Network World Industry Update Press release Network World November 21 1988 Retrieved 2020 12 08 ADDAMAX CORP v OPEN SOFTWARE FOUNDATION INC Leagale September 4 1998 Retrieved 2020 12 08 Heichler Elizabeth February 4 1991 OSF probed by feds unfair trade alleged Digital News The Newspaper for VAX System Management pp 1 6 Are Open Software s Standards Shutting Out Competitors Bloomberg May 12 1991 The OSF in fact has confirmed that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating it Open Software Foundation releases OSF 1 operating system offering customers powerful function industry standards tech insider org Retrieved 2018 12 04 Digital Delivers on the Open Advantage Promise of OSF 1 and DCE Press release Digital Equipment Corporation January 22 1992 Retrieved 2007 07 18 Smeloff Jane 17 January 1994 OSF Flash Motif an IEEE Standard Open Software Foundation Retrieved 2 September 2013 TET History The OpenGroup July 12 1996 Retrieved 2009 07 18 Ward Chris tjcw OSF Open Development Environment as modified by IBM GitHub Retrieved October 8 2020 Leading Vendors Unify to Accelerate Open Systems Press release AT amp T Global Information Systems Digital Equipment Corporation Hewlett Packard Company IBM Corporation SunSoft Incorporated et al March 23 1994 Retrieved 2007 07 18 OSF Announces Formal Launch of CDE Motif Project Press release Open Software Foundation September 7 1995 Retrieved 2007 07 18 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Open Software Foundation amp oldid 1150168630, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

article

, read, download, free, free download, mp3, video, mp4, 3gp, jpg, jpeg, gif, png, picture, music, song, movie, book, game, games.