Open Software Foundation - Products

Products

OSF's UNIX reference implementation was known as "OSF/1" and was first released in December 1991 and adopted by Digital a month later. 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 shelve 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 as well as vendor neutrality. This new OS was produced in a little more than a year's time and incorporated technology from Carnegie Mellon University: the Mach 2.5 microkernel; from IBM, the journaled file system as well as commands and libraries; from SecureWare secure core components; from BSD the networking stack; and a new virtual memory management system invented at OSF. By the time OSF stopped development of OSF/1 in 1994, the only major UNIX system vendor using the complete OSF/1 package was Digital, which rebranded it Digital UNIX (later known as 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 it arguably was most widely deployed Unix product ever produced. The OSF/1 copyright appears in the list of technologies used in the iPhone.

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 IEEE as P1295 in 1994. 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; 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.

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