Unix Wars - The Move Towards Open Source Code

The Move Towards Open Source Code

In March 1993 the major participants in UI and OSF formed the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) alliance, effectively marking the end of the most significant era of the Unix wars. In June, AT&T sold its UNIX assets to Novell, and in October Novell transferred the Unix brand to X/Open.

In 1996, X/Open and the new OSF merged to form the Open Group. COSE work such as the Single UNIX Specification, the current standard for branded Unix, is now the responsibility of the Open Group. However, the damage to Unix's market reputation had been done.

Since then, occasional bursts of Unix factionalism have broken out, such as the HP/SCO "3DA" alliance in 1995, and Project Monterey in 1998, a teaming of IBM, SCO, Sequent and Intel which was followed by litigation (SCO v. IBM) between IBM and the new SCO, formerly Caldera.

The Berkeley Software Distribution emerged as an independent Unix-like operating system, with the purging of code copyrighted by AT&T, in the period 1989-1994. During this time various open-source BSD derivatives took shape, starting with 386BSD, which was soon succeeded by FreeBSD and NetBSD. OpenBSD emerged in 1995 as a fork of NetBSD.

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