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Advances in grid and web service standards are becoming more fast-paced, and now UNICORE (UNiform Interface to COmputing REsources), the well-established European Grid software, has released a major new version: the open source UNICORE 6 Grid middleware system, enabling easy web services-based access to computing and data resources. In the fields of science and industry, computing and data resources are often distributed across many different systems, sites or countries. In order to make proper use of such a widely distributed infrastructure, end users rely on tools that provide easy and uniform access. The new UNICORE 6 release provides a modern lean software stack that implements an extensible service-oriented architecture compliant to current web service standards. It was released officially on August 28, 2007 at the UNICORE Summit 2007 at Rennes in France. UNICORE 6 skillfully supports leading open standards, inter-operability and extensibility through well-defined interfaces, and provides top performance and scalability. The tried and tested guiding principles of UNICORE have been preserved: straightforward and secure access to resources; ease of use; simple deployment of resources; easy support for adding new applications; and user-specific services. The development of UNICORE was initiated in Germany with funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research. German business and industry teamed up to develop seamless, secure and intuitive access to supercomputing resources. The initial software was implemented in Java and it offered a feature-rich and intuitive graphical client, effectively enabling users to run complex multi-site workflow jobs, and providing key support for many operating and batch systems. UNICORE was used to help establish the first supercomputing grid infrastructure in Europe. Since its inception, it has been improved and refined and it is currently being used in several European projects. Over the years, UNICORE has become a mature and well-tested grid middleware system that is used daily at a number of supercomputer centers worldwide. In addition to this type of usage, it serves as the basis of many European and international research projects. UNICORE 6 was jointly developed by an Intel Software and Solutions Group team in Bruhl, Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe in London, the University of Warsaw (ICM), CINECA in Bologna and Forschungszentrum Juelich under an open source BSD licence. From a technical perspective, UNICORE 6 complies with the OASIS WSRF 1.2 and OGF JSDL 1.0 standards, offers pluggable file transfer mechanisms with the OGSA ByteIO standard as default and uses XFire as a lean, high-performance SOAP stack in conjunction with the Jetty 6 web server.