There was a consortium, and it did standardise Unix, and that's when everything stopped moving in the 90s. Standards are compromises and so all the commercial Unixes had to implement the lowest common denominator. Thankfully GNU didn't care, and the BSD tools were already better.
Pick one... during the Unix Wars [0] there was X/Open [1] vs Unix International (aka AT&T) [2] and the Open Software Foundation [3] (which eventually merged with X/Open to form the Open Software Group). And then the IEEE got involved with POSIX which ultimately "won" as the lowest of the LCDs. [4]
Thanks! Once I moved from University to corporate america, I never looked back at the history of *nix standardization. And looking at these links, I feel awfully naive suggesting another consortium.
