I don't think that OSF had anything special at all. At the time, it looked like HP and DEC (especially DEC) trying to keep Sun and AT&T from steamrollering eve

I don't think that OSF had anything special at all. At the time, it looked like HP and DEC (especially DEC) trying to keep Sun and AT&T from steamrollering everything else. Bear in mind that in the mid-to-late 90s, there were a bunch of commercial Unix variants (HP-UX, Mips, SGI, DG-UX, Convergent, Pyramid, Dynix, DEC, Mt Xinu, etc etc). Each of them was holding on by their fingernails, more or less. The OSF was self-appointed to anoint the successor to BSD that was supposed to become The Unix next, as opposed to letting AT&T and Sun figure that out. The more cynical also believed that DEC was sowing chaos to give itself more time to either conquer the world with VMS, or figure out what to follow-up VMS with.