One Brand for UNIX

X/Open begins its single-specification branding program

One of the most sought-after goals in the history of open systems-a single UNIX brand available to all system suppliers-is now a reality. X/Open Co., bolstered by 12 of the most prominent UNIX system vendors, announced the brand's immediate availability in a teleconference in late February.

As of last week, five companies had been approved for UNIX branding, including Sun Microsystems and Siemens-Nixdorf. The other three companies had asked X/Open not to reveal their names, pending official announcements at UniForum '95 in Dallas.

Although X/Open's intention was revealed in October 1993, when Novell released the UNIX trademark to the X/Open, the open systems standards organization's recent announcement was met by relief on the part of vendors. Clearly, they are counting on the brand to stimulate interest and confidence among end users who may still be confused and put off by the many flavors of UNIX marketed by individual system manufacturers over the years. Now any vendor whose operating system conforms to the X/Open specification can apply for the UNIX brand. If X/Open approves, and the company pays an annual license fee, the vendor can display the "x UNIX" device on its products and in its marketing. The fee ranges from $25,000 to $110,000 depending on the company's size.

"This will really make it easy," for end users, said Mike Prince, director of information services for Burlington Coat Factory and ex-officio member of the UniForum Board of Directors. "Until now you had to ask a million questions to make sure that what you were buying was as open as you thought it was. The branding takes all the work out of it, which is great. And it should help the industry too. Those of us who were in open systems early had to learn a lot of the underlying technology. This is easier, because either it's branded or it's not. If it's branded, you don't have to do the rest of the homework, which means you don't have to be quite as technically oriented."

Vendors are happy too. "This UNIX brand is a tangible symbol in informing customers and application developers which products are compliant with specifications, developed by the open systems community through X/Open's open process," said Jim Bell, director of corporate alliances for Hewlett-Packard and also a member of the UniForum Board of Directors. "The single UNIX specification and X/Open branding are important steps for the progress of open systems. Our customers can confidently build their enterprise-wide, mission-critical applications around the single open operating specification."

Janpieter Scheerder, vice president and general manager of the Solaris business unit for SunSoft, said, "We think the big beneficiary in all this will be the customer, basically getting a better product by enabling competition on the implementation level-something only open systems can deliver on."

Test suites for system vendors to use in UNIX brand compliance are available from X/Open and are shipping now.

The start of UNIX branding is the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1992 with Novell's agreement to purchase the former UNIX System Laboratories from AT&T. When that purchase was completed in mid-1993, Novell acquired both the UNIX operating systems technology developed by AT&T from the 1960s through 1993, and the UNIX trademark itself. Novell-after announcing a UNIX strategy that annoyed or confused most of the industry-decided to give X/Open custody of the brand name. In the months that followed, X/Open developed test suites and a branding process under which system vendors-long attached to names like AIX, HP-UX, ULTRIX, and Solaris-could each call their operating systems UNIX. Whether the old names will now be abandoned remains to be seen.

The branding idea dovetailed with two other UNIX unification initiatives in 1993-the formation of the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) at UniForum '93, which led to the multivendor Common Desktop Environment (CDE), and the Spec 1170 initiative for a common UNIX application programming interface. Spec 1170 has been approved by X/Open and CDE products are just being announced and demonstrated at UniForum '95

Graham Bird, X/Open's director of branding, said the existence of a single UNIX branding specification "actually makes multivendor open systems a reality. This announcement is a signal to buyers that the computer systems suppliers mean business with open systems. It's a fundamental step forward. Effectively, we've had widespread availability of UNIX systems for some time. The key from this point on is to make those systems conform to a single specification. The only element that was missing in the equation prior to this announcement is the assured conformance element, particularly in the minds of our buyers."

The UNIX brand will carry with it a guarantee by the system manufacturer that has three points:

Several of the larger UNIX vendors have been following the X/Open UNIX branding program closely and have complied with interim branding requirements. Thus, they were poised to get their systems branded as soon as the new program was officially announced. Thirty-six companies signed a statement endorsing the branding program, including all the major vendors.

"X/Open branding will provide a way to certify that things are compliant, and that's good," Prince said. "It removes one of the reasons not to go with open systems. To the extent that applications aren't portable and operating environments aren't compatible in a heterogeneous world, what you are trying to get out of open systems is defeated. To the extent that there are barriers, open systems hasn't met its potential. The branding becomes a no-brainer way of making sure that what you're buying has the degree of openness that you're looking for."