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You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX. As for a s

by kev009 9y ago

You can basically buy the right to call yourself UNIX today from The Open Group. The most extreme example of this is z/OS, but Mac OS is also UNIX. As for a singular product it was always kind of muddy. There was early UNIX, Research UNIX, BSD and then System III and System V as products from AT&T. The last product that was "pure" UNIX was System V Release 4. You could buy it into the 90s for 3B2s and PCs. It had lots of derivatives that used it as the port base like Solaris, Interactive UNIX, UnixWare etc and the code was also widely incorporated into other port bases (AIX, IRIX, etc) that predate or incorporated lots of different code like OSF/1. IIRC Novell came to own this "pure" UNIX and then sold it to SCO. I would say any of the BSDs are UNIX today, but that caused a pretty big legal gaffe between AT&T and BSDi in the early '90s and limited adoption at a critical point. OpenBSD to me seems like the spiritual Research UNIX continuation.

flukus 9y ago
Could we crowd fund a campaign to buy a unix license for linux and end this silliness once and for all?
- exikyut 9y ago
  A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful. I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay. But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset. So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI. Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch. NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
- kev009 9y ago
  It would be pretty comical to do so, just to muddy the already muddy term. But it has very little practical utility. I don't think any regulatory body requires a "real" UNIX these days -- sure, some products require a particular OS like AIX but I haven't heard of a spec/customer/vendor demanding "UNIX". Most clueful people would talk in terms of POSIX and {POSIX, UNIX, Linux}-like to describe the desire for portable software APIs or whatever. Upon more thought, maybe all caps UNIX should refer to the legacy AT&T system. In the modern lexicon, Unix is mainly two things: a command environment (i.e. a shell with UNIX-like built ins and pipes) and a philosophy (shell, simple short commands, pipes, hierarchical file system, less is more etc). This use still has great meaning to me and I wish more people would spend the time to learn the culture, reading books like those by author Peter H. Salus. Using those definitions, it should still be common to talk about "Unix shell scripting" or thinking about software design in a "Unix environment", even if that were to execute entirely on Linux in practice.

by kev009 9y ago

flukus 9y ago

Could we crowd fund a campaign to buy a unix license for linux and end this silliness once and for all?

exikyut 9y ago
A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful. I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay. But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset. So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI. Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch. NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
kev009 9y ago
It would be pretty comical to do so, just to muddy the already muddy term. But it has very little practical utility. I don't think any regulatory body requires a "real" UNIX these days -- sure, some products require a particular OS like AIX but I haven't heard of a spec/customer/vendor demanding "UNIX". Most clueful people would talk in terms of POSIX and {POSIX, UNIX, Linux}-like to describe the desire for portable software APIs or whatever. Upon more thought, maybe all caps UNIX should refer to the legacy AT&T system. In the modern lexicon, Unix is mainly two things: a command environment (i.e. a shell with UNIX-like built ins and pipes) and a philosophy (shell, simple short commands, pipes, hierarchical file system, less is more etc). This use still has great meaning to me and I wish more people would spend the time to learn the culture, reading books like those by author Peter H. Salus. Using those definitions, it should still be common to talk about "Unix shell scripting" or thinking about software design in a "Unix environment", even if that were to execute entirely on Linux in practice.