86open

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86open was a project to form consensus on a common binary file format for Unix and Unix-like operating systems on the common PC compatible x86 architecture, so as to encourage software developers to port to the architecture.^[1]

The format eventually chosen was Linux ELF, after it had turned out to be a de facto standard used by all involved vendors and operating systems.

1 History
2 See also
3 Notes
4 References

[edit] History

The group started email discussions in 1997 and first met in person at the Santa Cruz Operation offices on 1997-08-22.

The steering committee was Marc Ewing, Dion Johnson, Evan Leibovitch, Bruce Perens, Andrew Roach, Bryan Sparks and Linus Torvalds. Other people on the project were Tim Bird, Keith Bostic, Chuck Cranor, Michael Davidson, Chris G. Demetriou, Ulrich Drepper, Don Dugger, Steve Ginzburg, Jon "maddog" Hall, Ron Holt, Jordan Hubbard, Dave Jensen, Kean Johnston, Andrew Josey, Robert Lipe, Bela Lubkin, Tim Marsland, Greg Page, Ronald Joe Record, Tim Ruckle, Joel Silverstein, Chia-pi Tien and Erik Troan. Operating systems and companies represented were BeOS, BSDI, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, SCO and SunSoft, Inc..

The project progressed and in mid-1998, SCO began assisting in the development of lxrun, an open-source compatibility layer capable of running Linux binaries on OpenServer, UnixWare, and Solaris. SCO announced official support of lxrun at LinuxWorld in March 1999. Sun Microsystems also officially began supporting lxrun in early 1999.^[2]

With the BSDs having long supported Linux binaries and the main x86 Unix vendors having added support for the format, the project decided that Linux ELF was the format chosen by the industry and "declare[d] itself dissolved" on July 25, 1999.^[3]