COSE
More info
- Founded
- Type
- Industry alliance
- Members
- HP, IBM, Sun, USL, SCO, Univel
The truce in the Unix wars: the 1993 alliance in which HP, IBM, Sun and USL promised a common desktop and a common API — and actually delivered.
The Common Open Software Environment was announced at the UniForum trade show in March 1993 by HP, IBM, Sun, Unix System Laboratories, SCO and Univel. The motive was panic rather than reconciliation: Windows NT was on its way, and the Unix vendors realised that a dozen mutually incompatible Unix variants were a weaker sales pitch than a single Windows. The alliance set out to unify six areas, from networking to multimedia. Two of them came to something.
One was the desktop. Sun gave up OPEN LOOK, HP put forward VUE, and the result was CDE, built on OSF's Motif. The other was "Spec 1170", a list of the 1,170 system calls and library functions a Unix had to provide, compiled by counting what existing applications actually used. The list was handed to X/Open and became the Single UNIX Specification. The alliance itself was gone by 1994, when its work moved into a reorganised OSF, but both deliverables outlived it by a wide margin.