Meaning – The term open software foundation, refers to a nonprofit research and development organization whose goals are (a) to develop specifications and software for use in an open software environment and (b) to make the specifications and software available to information technology vendors under fair and equitable licensing terms. For example, OSF developed the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE).
OSF’s Unix reference implementation was named OSF/1. It was first released in December 1990 and adopted by Digital a month later. As part of the founding of the organization, the AIX operating system was provided by IBM and was intended to be passed through to the member companies of OSF. However, delays and portability concerns caused the OSF staff to cancel the original plan. Instead, a new Unix reference operating system using components from across the industry would be released on a wide range of platforms to demonstrate its portability and vendor neutrality.
Example of usage – “Other technologies developed by OSF include Motif and Distributed Computing Environment (DCE), respectively a widget toolkit and package of distributed network computing technologies.”
