[[Open Software Foundation]] (OSF) came about to a large degree as part of the [[Unix wars]] of the 1980s. After [[Sun Microsystems]] and [[AT&T]] worked together to produce [[UNIX System V|UNIX System V Release 4]] (SVR4) and refused to commit to fair and open licensing of Unix source code, many of the other Unix vendors felt their own market opportunities were unduly disadvantaged. They quickly formed the [[Open Software Foundation]] (OSF) to compete with an open, standards-based Unix that was available to anyone on fair and open licensing terms. Initially, IBM offered AIX as the base for this operating system component (OSC), but OSF ended up developing and introducing [[OSF/1]], which was based on the [[Mach kernel]]. When DARPA moved funding from the Berkeley CSRG to fund the CMU Mach project, OSF, HP and DEC supplied the funding to complete the free BSD 4.4 release. Some BSD code (UFS filesystem, ISO stack) was used in the OSF/1 offering, along with SVR2 code (filesystem) and AIX code (LVM). During the 1990s, Mach researchers had difficulty achieving the expected performance benefits from Mach, which used a message passing interface to implement system calls, though many other benefits were achieved in research versions. However, an undeniable perception developed that Mach had relatively poor performance compared to SVR4. OSF/1 became the basis for [[Digital Unix]]. OSF merged with [[X/Open]] and the [[X Consortium]] to form [[The Open Group]]. [[The Open Group]] controls the Unix Trademark as part of its branding and certification program, while Novell controls the traditional Unix SVR4 source code. Distributed Computing Environment is a component of the OSF offerings, along with Motif and Distributed Management Environment (DME).
As part of the formation of OSF, various members contributed many of their ongoing research projects as well as their commercial products. For example, HP/Apollo contributed its Network Computing Environment (NCS) and CMA Threads products. Siemens Nixdorf contributed its X.500 server and ASN/1 compiler tools. At the time, network computing was quite popular, and many of the companies involved were working on similar [[Remote procedure call|RPC]]-based systems. By integrating security, RPC and other distributed services on a single "official" distributed computing environment, OSF could offer a major advantage over SVR4, allowing any DCE-supporting system (namely OSF/1) to interoperate in a larger network.
