Origins
In the mid-1980s, the two common versions of Unix were BSD, from the University of California, Berkeley, and System V, from AT&T Corporation. Both were derived from the earlier Version 7 Unix, but had diverged considerably. Further, each vendor's version of Unix was different to some degree.
A group of vendors formed the X/Open standards group in 1984, with the aim of forming compatible open systems. They chose to base their system on Unix.
X/Open caught AT&T's attention. To increase the uniformity of Unix, AT&T and leading BSD Unix vendor Sun Microsystems started work in 1987 on a unified system. (The feasibility of this had been demonstrated a few years earlier by the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory's System V environment for BSD Unix.) This was eventually released as System V Release 4 (SVR4).
While this decision was applauded by customers and the trade press, certain other Unix licensees feared Sun would be unduly advantaged. They formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in 1988. The same year, AT&T and another group of licensees responded by forming UNIX International. Technical issues soon took a back seat to vicious and public commercial competition between the two "open" versions of Unix, with X/Open holding the middle ground.
Read more about this topic: Unix Wars
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