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> Try to write a modern iOS, OS X, Windows, Android, ChromeOS UWP with standardized POSIX interfaces. You're confusing popularity with being outdated. It's ir

> Try to write a modern iOS, OS X, Windows, Android, ChromeOS UWP with standardized POSIX interfaces. You're confusing popularity with being outdated. It's irrelevant if some vendors intentionallly go out of their way to avoid implementing any standard interface which, in the very least, can't be controlled by them. And it's also absurd that you're quoting platforms which even restrict which programming language can be used to write applications purely due to their business strategies.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
"You're confusing popularity with being outdated." POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point of default way that apps were written. It failed. Whereas there's quite a bit of portable apps on (insert framework here). They succeeded with many running on non-UNIX OS's, too. You'll need those or similar things in your code instead of POSIX for truly, portable apps. That's his point.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point If you read up on why companies such as Microsoft make it their point to break and avoid standards, you would understand why your comments regarding "popularity" are moot. Business strategies don't make or break technical merits.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I would not if the goal of a standard is uptake by OS and application developers. Wide usage of a product = popularity. It didn't achieve the popularity it sought. This is independent of what businesses like Microsoft were doing. Microsoft's strategy was to create a permanent dependence on them for long-term profitability. They had too many tactics for that to cover here. Once open standards proliferated, they subverted them too with proprietary extensions under "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy. Companies buying into their solutions and using non-standard features paid the price. Regardless, people still created apps that worked on such proprietary platforms and UNIXen via portability frameworks or libraries. Some products using them became quite popular (eg Apache, Netscape/Firefox) with some of the frameworks themselves becoming popular (eg Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Tk). POSIX's got into enough stuff that it was a default many picked up. Whereas, these others people went to willingly even when POSIX was available with even more portability. That's why they were objectively more successful on portability.
    - geezerjay 10y ago
      > I would not if the goal of a standard is uptake by OS and application developers. That point is moot, as those platforms were designed with the express purpose of being particularly hostile regarding interoperability while forcing other corporate products as alternatives, in a well-known lock-in strategy.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        "those platforms were designed with the express purpose" They were designed with the purpose of giving users a way to get things done that was profitable to the company. The first part along with lock-in techniques are why most of the desktop market is Windows with a large chunk of the server market. That means the kind of portability that matters to people wanting to maximize benefit to users or profits to the company better include a Windows version. There are portability alternatives to POSIX that allow that usually with other benefits on top of it. Far from moot...
        geezerjay 10y ago
        > They were designed with the purpose of giving users No, they actually weren't. The "users" don't have any say whether Windows complies with any standard, or even if Microsoft breaks all of them to try to force the world to submit to their "vendor lock-in" business strategy. Trying to pass off the consequences of vendor lock-in policies as technical arguments is somewhere between absurd and disingenuous.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        You said the only purpose of what Windows did was locking in people. I said it was to provide software that let people accomplish what they want while making profit sustained by lockin tricks. Are you saying Microsoft never intended people to use Windows API or software to accomplish their personal goals? That there is zero benefit to users of Windows in consumer or business space?
    - 10y ago
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Are you also speaking about all those APIs in GNU/Linux that aren't part of any other UNIX clone?
    - geezerjay 10y ago
      You're confusing things. You don't break a standard when you write a function or even a whole library.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        So Microsoft, Google and Apple do it, it is bad. Linux does it, it is me that doesn't understand, I see.
        AsyncAwait 10y ago
        Linux is mostly POSIX compliant. It has layers on top that are not POSIX, but that doesn't mean it is not POSIX or that you can't expect your POSIX apps to work on Linux.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Not at all, it means that many mistakenly use Linux syscalls as synonym for POSIX, thus making the same lock-in to GNU/Linux as Google, Apple and Microsoft do to their own systems. *BSD devs jump of joy having to port GNU/Linux applications that depend on D-BUS, systemd, or any other Linux specific APIs.
        AsyncAwait 10y ago
        Given that *BSDs also have many of their own extensions, (ie openbsd has many security extensions to the POSIX standard), that isn't the best example of a defense.
- felixgallo 10y ago
  > POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point of default way that apps were written. It failed. So POSIX was a long series of attempts to codify baseline Unix practice that arose because in the '87 time period there were tens of small, warring, incompatible Unix distributions ( cf. http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?ugu.flavors http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?ugu.flavors ), and systems software vendors could not write software that worked across all of these platforms properly. The original post report is a cri de coeur call to action written in POSIX magazine attempting to oversell the story with a clickbait title in order to urge further POSIX work. This thread and others is loaded with people that have only read the title and have their own half-formed opinions. There was never any idea that all apps everywhere would be written with POSIX. That's a ridiculous reading. I was there at the time. It was just an effort to get all of the Unix vendors on the same page so that the big commercial non-Unix OS vendor and their salespeople wouldn't eat the lunch of the high end workstation and server market. And it succeeded phenomenally. With POSIX as a more-or-less stable substrate, it became possible to run, e.g., gnu's entire platform on almost anything that was POSIX-compliant or close; e.g. SunOS, Solaris, and eventually Linux, with minimal effort. It became possible for software like vi, emacs, mysql, sqlite to exist. Sysadmins could write shell scripts without anything like the kind of portability fear they had in the past. Uncoincidentally, this continues today; all of the non-Windows software you're using is based on POSIX standards. Every phone is packed with POSIX-foundationed databases, daemons and sometimes even userlands. And of course there's Linux which, despite the continuing efforts of Red Hat, is about as POSIX as it comes. Read the box at the bottom of page 9 of the original post. POSIX won, totally and unconditionally.
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > I was there at the time. It was just an effort to get all of the Unix vendors on the same page so that the big commercial non-Unix OS vendor and their salespeople wouldn't eat the lunch of the high end workstation and server market. Precisely. Additionallly, criticizing the technical merits of an international standard established in 1997 is a disingenuous ordeal. If anyone actually has any meaningful and tangible technical issue to point out regarding POSIX, they should simply put forth an implementation that actually addresses the issues and use it as a basis for a discussion to update the standard. Standards are meant to be used as references, and therefore are meant to be updated when the need arises.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"You're confusing popularity with being outdated." POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point of default way that apps were written. It failed. Whereas there's quite a bit of portable apps on (insert framework here). They succeeded with many running on non-UNIX OS's, too. You'll need those or similar things in your code instead of POSIX for truly, portable apps. That's his point.

geezerjay 10y ago
> POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point If you read up on why companies such as Microsoft make it their point to break and avoid standards, you would understand why your comments regarding "popularity" are moot. Business strategies don't make or break technical merits.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  I would not if the goal of a standard is uptake by OS and application developers. Wide usage of a product = popularity. It didn't achieve the popularity it sought. This is independent of what businesses like Microsoft were doing. Microsoft's strategy was to create a permanent dependence on them for long-term profitability. They had too many tactics for that to cover here. Once open standards proliferated, they subverted them too with proprietary extensions under "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" strategy. Companies buying into their solutions and using non-standard features paid the price. Regardless, people still created apps that worked on such proprietary platforms and UNIXen via portability frameworks or libraries. Some products using them became quite popular (eg Apache, Netscape/Firefox) with some of the frameworks themselves becoming popular (eg Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Tk). POSIX's got into enough stuff that it was a default many picked up. Whereas, these others people went to willingly even when POSIX was available with even more portability. That's why they were objectively more successful on portability.
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    > I would not if the goal of a standard is uptake by OS and application developers. That point is moot, as those platforms were designed with the express purpose of being particularly hostile regarding interoperability while forcing other corporate products as alternatives, in a well-known lock-in strategy.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "those platforms were designed with the express purpose" They were designed with the purpose of giving users a way to get things done that was profitable to the company. The first part along with lock-in techniques are why most of the desktop market is Windows with a large chunk of the server market. That means the kind of portability that matters to people wanting to maximize benefit to users or profits to the company better include a Windows version. There are portability alternatives to POSIX that allow that usually with other benefits on top of it. Far from moot...
      - geezerjay 10y ago
        > They were designed with the purpose of giving users No, they actually weren't. The "users" don't have any say whether Windows complies with any standard, or even if Microsoft breaks all of them to try to force the world to submit to their "vendor lock-in" business strategy. Trying to pass off the consequences of vendor lock-in policies as technical arguments is somewhere between absurd and disingenuous.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        You said the only purpose of what Windows did was locking in people. I said it was to provide software that let people accomplish what they want while making profit sustained by lockin tricks. Are you saying Microsoft never intended people to use Windows API or software to accomplish their personal goals? That there is zero benefit to users of Windows in consumer or business space?
  - 10y ago
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Are you also speaking about all those APIs in GNU/Linux that aren't part of any other UNIX clone?
  - geezerjay 10y ago
    You're confusing things. You don't break a standard when you write a function or even a whole library.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      So Microsoft, Google and Apple do it, it is bad. Linux does it, it is me that doesn't understand, I see.
      - AsyncAwait 10y ago
        Linux is mostly POSIX compliant. It has layers on top that are not POSIX, but that doesn't mean it is not POSIX or that you can't expect your POSIX apps to work on Linux.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Not at all, it means that many mistakenly use Linux syscalls as synonym for POSIX, thus making the same lock-in to GNU/Linux as Google, Apple and Microsoft do to their own systems. *BSD devs jump of joy having to port GNU/Linux applications that depend on D-BUS, systemd, or any other Linux specific APIs.
        AsyncAwait 10y ago
        Given that *BSDs also have many of their own extensions, (ie openbsd has many security extensions to the POSIX standard), that isn't the best example of a defense.
felixgallo 10y ago
> POSIX was supposed to be popular to the point of default way that apps were written. It failed. So POSIX was a long series of attempts to codify baseline Unix practice that arose because in the '87 time period there were tens of small, warring, incompatible Unix distributions ( cf. http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?ugu.flavors http://www.ugu.com/sui/ugu/show?ugu.flavors ), and systems software vendors could not write software that worked across all of these platforms properly. The original post report is a cri de coeur call to action written in POSIX magazine attempting to oversell the story with a clickbait title in order to urge further POSIX work. This thread and others is loaded with people that have only read the title and have their own half-formed opinions. There was never any idea that all apps everywhere would be written with POSIX. That's a ridiculous reading. I was there at the time. It was just an effort to get all of the Unix vendors on the same page so that the big commercial non-Unix OS vendor and their salespeople wouldn't eat the lunch of the high end workstation and server market. And it succeeded phenomenally. With POSIX as a more-or-less stable substrate, it became possible to run, e.g., gnu's entire platform on almost anything that was POSIX-compliant or close; e.g. SunOS, Solaris, and eventually Linux, with minimal effort. It became possible for software like vi, emacs, mysql, sqlite to exist. Sysadmins could write shell scripts without anything like the kind of portability fear they had in the past. Uncoincidentally, this continues today; all of the non-Windows software you're using is based on POSIX standards. Every phone is packed with POSIX-foundationed databases, daemons and sometimes even userlands. And of course there's Linux which, despite the continuing efforts of Red Hat, is about as POSIX as it comes. Read the box at the bottom of page 9 of the original post. POSIX won, totally and unconditionally.
- geezerjay 10y ago
  > I was there at the time. It was just an effort to get all of the Unix vendors on the same page so that the big commercial non-Unix OS vendor and their salespeople wouldn't eat the lunch of the high end workstation and server market. Precisely. Additionallly, criticizing the technical merits of an international standard established in 1997 is a disingenuous ordeal. If anyone actually has any meaningful and tangible technical issue to point out regarding POSIX, they should simply put forth an implementation that actually addresses the issues and use it as a basis for a discussion to update the standard. Standards are meant to be used as references, and therefore are meant to be updated when the need arises.