Open Software Foundation

“[I]n May 1988, a number of important computer manufacturers &mdash; including defendants Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. &mdash; formed the Open Software Foundation as a non-profit joint research and development venture. OSF registered under the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984, 15 U.S.C. § 4301, although that status has no direct importance for the issues before us. At least one of OSF’s professed objectives was to develop an alternative Unix operating system, denominated OSF-1, as a competitor to the Unix system being developed jointly by AT&T and Sun Microsystems.”