The ALMA Common Software (ACS) is an application framework designed to provide a common and homogeneous software architecture and infrastructure, spanning the end to end needs of an Astronomical observatory, from the Telescope Control system to high-level data flow management. ACS offers, at the lower level, several basic services needed for object-oriented distributed computing like transparent remote object invocation, object deployment and location, distributed error, alarm handling, logging and events. On top of this it provides an application architecture based on the Component/Container paradigm that fosters sharing and reusing of software components. Although developed for the ALMA project, ACS is now used by several other projects worldwide, among which the Italian Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT). Besides, there is an active community that shares ideas, concepts and actual software components. Major drivers for this diffusion were the choice of adopting the LGPL public license and the adoption of CORBA, a free but reliable and widely used middleware software. In this paper we present an overview of the main features of ACS, emphasizing in particular the role of INAF-OAT in this project.