86open manifesto

This is an archived copy of the 86open working group's convocational; it appears to have been removed from telly.org. This would lead to selection of the Executable and Linkable Format as a de facto standard object format for modern UNIXes. This text was taken from Bruce Perens's 1997-10-10 message to the debian-announce Debian mailing list.

                             The 86open Project
                                      
               Unix-on-Intel players work on a common binary
   
   A group which includes some of the key developers of Unix operating
   systems on Intel architecture computers have agreed to work on a
   common programming and binary interface.
   
   At a meeting held mid-August at the head office of SCO, participants
   achieved consensus on a way to create software applications which
   would run, without modification or emulation, on the Intel-based
   versions of:
   
     * BSDI
     * FreeBSD
     * Linux
     * NetBSD
     * SCO OpenServer
     * Sunsoft Solaris
     * SCO UnixWare
       
   The goal of this effort is to encourage software developers to port to
   the Unix-Intel platform by reducing the effort needed to support the
   diverse mix of operating systems of this kind currently available.
   
   The specification, called "86open", will be published and freely
   available to any environment wishing compliance. It involves the use
   of a standardized libc shared library of basic functions to be
   provided on all systems. This library will provide a consistent
   interface to programmers, hiding the differences between the various
   operating systems and allowing the resulting binary programs to run
   unaltered on any compliant system. Whenever possible, it will be
   consistent with The Open Group's Single Unix Specification.
   
   Each participating operating system will be free to implement the
   86open library specification on its own. However, the reference
   implementation will be based upon GNU's glibc version 2, ensuring that
   it will remain open and freely available. The actual list and behavior
   of the 86open functions is presently being determined.
   
   Participants in the meeting, who will be involved with the ongoing
   evolution of the 86open specification, include people deeply involved
   with the operating systems mentioned in this project. The 86open
   steering committee, a core of this group which will assemble the work
   and produce the final specification, comprises:
   
   Marc Ewing, Dion Johnson, Evan Leibovitch, Bruce Perens, Andrew Roach,
   Bryan Sparks and Linus Torvalds
   
   For more information, contact 86open@telly.org.