COS
acronymnetworkingvendors & products
Corporation for Open Systems: a vendor consortium formed to certify OSI conformance.
When a standard is large enough that no two implementations agree, somebody has to say which ones count. COS was the industry's attempt to be that somebody, funded by the vendors whose products it would judge. It produced real testing work and could not solve the underlying problem: the specification kept moving, and the market it was certifying for was being taken by protocols that had shipped.
Also known as: corporation for open systems