Unix International (UI) was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. Its most notable members were

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, and in fact the commonly accepted reason for its existence was as a counterbalance to the

Open Software Foundation The Open Software Foundation, Inc. (OSF), was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988 and merged with X/Open in 1996, to become The Open Group. ...

(OSF), itself created in response to AT&T's and Sun's Unix partnership of that time. UI and OSF thus represented the two sides of the

Unix wars The Unix wars were struggles between vendors to set a standard for the Unix operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Origins Both AT&T Corporation and University of California, Berkeley are important in the early history of Unix. Al ...

in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In May 1993, the major members of both UI and OSF announced the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. This was followed by the merging of UI and OSF into a "new OSF" in March 1994, which in turn merged with

X/Open X/Open group (also known as the Open Group for Unix Systems and incorporated in 1987 as X/Open Company, Ltd.) was a consortium founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standards in the field of info ...

in 1996, forming

The Open Group The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing " open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has 900+ member organizations and provides a number of services ...

References

Chapter 11. OSF and UNIX International
( Peter H. Salus, ''The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin'')
UI / OSF merger announcements
Standards organizations in the United States Unix history {{US-org-stub