The Open Group

The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has 900+ member organizations and provides a number of services, including strategy, management, innovation and research, standards, certification, and test development. It was established in 1996 when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation. The Open Group is the certifying body for the UNIX trademark, and publishes the Single UNIX Specification technical standard, which extends the POSIX standards. The Open Group also develops and manages the TOGAF standard, which is an industry standard enterprise architecture framework. The 900+ members include a range of technology vendors and buyers as well as government agencies, including, for example, Capgemini, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Orbus Software, IBM, Huawei, the United States Department of Defense and NASA. There is no obligation on product developers or vendors to adopt the standards developed by the association. Platinum members: By the early 1990s, the major UNIX system vendors had begun to realize that the standards rivalries (often called 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.