The Open Group

The Open Group (formerly the X/Open Company[?]) is a industry consortium[?] sposored by IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu for forming de facto-standards in the field of software engineering, in particular APIs.

The group is most known for their publication of the Single UNIX Specification paper - which (in the eyes of many OS developers) is quickly superseding the POSIX standards. In addition, they are the owners of the UNIX trademark. The Open Group provides conformance testing, certifications and white papers usually concerning Unix operating systems. Many of their papers are members-only.

It was previously known as the Open Software Foundation and the X/Open Company[?].

The Open Group or its earlier incarnations has invented and standardized, among other things:

• The Single UNIX Specification
• The Call Level Interface (the basis for ODBC)
• the Common Desktop Environment, CDE
• OpenDoc, a now defunct specification for compound documents[?]
• LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
• The Motif GUI widgetset (used in CDE)

The Open Group also certifies things they do not specify and control themselves, such as:

• CORBA, the Common Request Broker Architecture implementations, as specified by the Object Management Group.
• Linux standard base from the Free Standards Group.

Similar organisations:

• W3C
• IEEE

External Links

• http://www.opengroup.org/