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> 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 u

> 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?
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  > It didn't achieve the popularity it sought By what metric? POSIX was never trying to be the universal interface for all kinds of applications, just some sane common interface for UNIX vendors, all of which do implement POSIX to a large extent these days. You could perhaps make the argument that by the time POSIX saw enough adoption, software development evolved and that nowdays there are lots of interfaces that are not part of POSIX/not portable, but that's a slightly different issue.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    That's close to my argument. There's kind of two conversations going on in these threads: UNIX portability and general portability. POSIX is fine on former but worse on latter since it wasnt designed for it (among other things).
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.

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?
AsyncAwait 10y ago
> It didn't achieve the popularity it sought By what metric? POSIX was never trying to be the universal interface for all kinds of applications, just some sane common interface for UNIX vendors, all of which do implement POSIX to a large extent these days. You could perhaps make the argument that by the time POSIX saw enough adoption, software development evolved and that nowdays there are lots of interfaces that are not part of POSIX/not portable, but that's a slightly different issue.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  That's close to my argument. There's kind of two conversations going on in these threads: UNIX portability and general portability. POSIX is fine on former but worse on latter since it wasnt designed for it (among other things).

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.