The Open Group: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

The Open Group is an industry consortium sponsored by IBM, Sun, HP, Hitachi, and Fujitsu for forming de facto-standards in the field of software engineering, in particular APIs. The Open Group was formed from a merger of the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and X/Open.

The group is most known for its publication of the Single UNIX Specification paper, which (in the eyes of many OS developers) is quickly superseding the POSIX standards. In addition, it is the owner of the UNIX trademark. The Open Group provides conformance testing, certifications and white papers usually concerning Unix operating systems. The Open Group also certifies things that it does not specify and control itself, such as CORBA, the Common Request Broker Architecture implementations (as specified by the OMG), and the Linux Standard Base (from the FSG).

Despite the name, many Open Group papers are in fact members-only. A similar organisation to the Open Group is the W3C.

See also: UNIX wars

Inventions and standards

• The Call Level Interface (the basis for ODBC)
• The Common Desktop Environment (CDE)
• LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
• The Motif GUI widget toolkit (used in CDE)
• OpenDoc, a now defunct specification for compound documents
• The Single UNIX Specification
• The X Window System¹

( ¹ previously maintained, developed by T.O.G. )