The Open Group

The Open Group is a vendor- and technology-neutral industry consortium, currently with over four hundred member organizations. It was formed in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation. Services provided include strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development.

The Open Group is most famous as the certifying body for the UNIX trademark, and its publication of the Single UNIX Specification technical standard, which extends the POSIX standards and is the official definition of a UNIX system. The Open Group also develops and manages the TOGAF standard, which is an industry standard enterprise architecture framework.

The Open Group members include a range of IT buyers and vendors as well as government agencies, for example Capgemini, Fujitsu, Oracle, Hitachi, HP, Orbus Software, IBM, Kingdee, NEC, SAP, US Department of Defense, NASA and others.

History

By the early 1990s, the major UNIX system vendors had begun to realize that the standards rivalries often termed as the Unix wars were causing all participants more harm than good, leaving the UNIX industry open to emerging competition from Microsoft. The COSE initiative in 1993 can be considered to be the first unification step and the merger of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open in 1996 as the ultimate step in the end of those skirmishes. OSF had previously merged with UNIX International in 1994, meaning that the new entity effectively represented all elements of the Unix community of the time.