Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/October 11

Today in 1993 the UNIX trademark was transferred to the vendor-independent X/Open consortium. While previously only one or two dominant variants existed, several increasingly incompatible proprietary Unix forks appeared in the past few years. Vendors had been fighting for influence on the development of the platform standard and fragmented the Unix ecosystem. AT&T partnered with Sun, which prompted concerned rivals to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to develop open Unix standards. AT&T and its partners then formed their own standards group, Unix International. The first significant step towards resolving the so-called Unix wars was taken with the formation of the Common Open Software Environment initiative, when all participants came together in a neutral forum to base the future of all their Unix variants on open, unified standards.