OSF (Open Software Foundation)
The consortium seven Unix vendors formed in 1988 so as not to leave Unix to AT&T and Sun, which gave the world Motif, OSF/1 and DCE before folding into The Open Group.
When AT&T bought into Sun in 1987 and the two began merging System V and SunOS into SVR4, the rest of the industry suspected the standard would henceforth be set by two companies. In May 1988 Apollo, DEC, HP, IBM, Bull, Nixdorf and Siemens formed the Open Software Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Sun's Scott McNealy read the initials as "Oppose Sun Forever". AT&T and Sun answered with Unix International that autumn, and the industry had two camps with a toolkit and a desktop each: Motif and the DECwindows heritage on one side, OPEN LOOK on the other. This is what is known as the Unix wars.
OSF's products outlived OSF. Motif (1989) won the desktop. OSF/1 (1990), a Mach-based Unix, became DEC's Digital UNIX and Tru64. DCE, the distributed environment with RPC and Kerberos, lives on in Microsoft's MSRPC and thus in every Windows network. The truce came in 1993 with COSE and CDE, Unix International dissolved in 1994, and in 1996 OSF merged with X/Open to form The Open Group, which has owned the UNIX trademark ever since, certifies against the Single UNIX Specification and from 1997 took over stewardship of X11.