“Dead effort or declaration of victory? You
decide.”
“On October 1997, a group informally calling itself the 86open
project issued a communiqué, discussing the need for a
standard binary executable for the various Unix and Unix
derivatives which run on Intel 80X86 “PC”-architecture systems.
“The group, which had met earlier that year at the headquarters
of SCO, eventually included representatives or developers involved
with the most popular such operating system suppliers…”
“The aim of this effort was 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 group was making reasonable, if slow, progress into mid
1998. At that time, SCO was involved in the development of lxrun,
software which ran Linux-format binaries under the two SCO
operating systems…”
“The lxrun package is now stable and runs well. It was
officially announced by SCO at LinuxWorld in March 1999, and was
later ported by Sun to allow Linux binaries to run under
SolarisX86.
“With these announcements, the need for a distinct common binary
standard is gone.”
“It is therefore only logical that the 86open project declare
itself dissolved.”