12 ms·

The story behind OS X’s Unix compliant certification

456 points by azinman2 5y ago

jjtheblunt 5y ago
> By this time, I knew pretty much every one of the 13 million lines of kernel code in the Mac OS X kernel. narcissism overload; stopped reading there
puffoflogic 5y ago
It is interesting how much weight the author puts on bypassing process and bureaucracy to the success of the project.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    > that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Most people? (Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in general).
      - seba_dos1 5y ago
        I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense to you. To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people interact with other people. Social rules? Those that "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?... Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid, but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal consequences - it's about the principle. But total abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help people break that law should there be a need for it. Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society, sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and sometimes the other way around. To be honest, I have no idea where the line between "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist" actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I guess. When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without telling me why. I think they were interpreting my questions as undermining their authority, which ironically made them less likely to actually answer me, but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to work in a field where I generally don't have to do things that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents were warning me about back then ;)). Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority personality trait".
        BurningPenguin 5y ago
        Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.
    - weatherlight 5y ago
      I find people will go with the flow and basically follow orders. Most people won't shake the boat.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    > It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit of course https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-between-cattle-temperament-and-autism/ https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-bet...
- microtherion 5y ago
  Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.
  - astrange 5y ago
    It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.
    - microtherion 5y ago
      What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work. Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.
- olliej 5y ago
  I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor" bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable response. Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they will have many restrictions on any changes going in, including feature work from their own team, let alone some random potentially behavior changing ones. Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even if making tests is hard. There have been a few times where I have spent longer (sometimes way longer) building the infrastructure to make a test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the time there's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently important that they might want to bypass such.
- xtat 5y ago
  The view from here is that doing anything at big SV tech is way more politics than tech.
chrisseaton 5y ago
> I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high level, ever again, in the future. I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?
- bitwize 5y ago
  Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly he fucked up, just to spite him. "You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to discharge fleeting grudges.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > how badly he fucked up I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it? And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?
    - bitwize 5y ago
      > I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it? If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO consider you someone to count on again? > And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs? Because he built this industry.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. Are you under the impression that for example lawyers are fired every time they lose a case and a company has to pay out?
Lammy 5y ago
> The lawsuit was filed because the owner of Mac OS X Server kept putting “UNIX” on the web site, and all other marketing collateral for the Server product. Like https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750 https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750 "First of all, [Mac OS X] is Unix-based, as you know. What you may not know is that Apple has become the #1 supplier of Unix in the world — bigger than Sun; bigger than Linux; bigger than anyone! But we don't want to rest on that. We think we have one of the best versions of Unix out there — Jagwire makes it even better with a whole bunch of cool new Unix things." As the OP implies (missing Tiger), Leopard was the first certified version: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-rec...
- willis936 5y ago
  Doesn't linux stand for "linux is not unix"?
  - rovr138 5y ago
    No. >Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical.[13] >In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. So, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds.[13] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". >To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide (audio speaker iconlisten (help·info)) with the kernel source code.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming
    - rileymat2 5y ago
      When crossing languages shouldn’t pronunciation change?
AceJohnny2 5y ago
> We bought begrudging buy-in from Mike Smith (yes, that* Mike Smith) by having him rewrite the file locking code.* Anyone know who is that Mike Smith?
- drewg123 5y ago
  I suspect its the Mike Smith who was a FreeBSD committer and core team member 20-ish years ago.
  - ksec 5y ago
    This? [1] May be worth its own HN submission. But that mail, 20 years ago reads to me the problem with today's open source aren't that much different to now. [1] https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-s-not-fun-anymore-mike-resigns-from-core https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-s-no...
nsxwolf 5y ago
Wow, $10 million in Apple stock... Reading this, I feel like I've done things that were this big... or a decent fraction of it... and never got so much as a thank you
- Scramblejams 5y ago
  Sounds like he didn't get it: https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-better-employer-from-an-employee-s-perspective https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-better-employer-from-...
  - nsxwolf 5y ago
    Oh wow. What a blow. The way I make myself feel better about all the stocks and options I was never offered in my career is by assuming something like that would have happened to me.
  - fyrabanks 5y ago
    I'm extremely curious about the "untimely death trigger conditions" part at the end...
  - Jedd 5y ago
    I think this may be a more relevant link to the 'I didn't get paid' - and explains a little more of the veiled threats to whomever Simon Patience is from your link. https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ralfd 5y ago
      https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9 https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9 Apple Vice President Core OS Software (2002–2014)
    - xtracto 5y ago
coldtea 5y ago
Interesting part: > We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community — particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests. You have absolutely no idea how much Apple contributed to the Open Source community, as part of this project, because it was a secret project — at least to people outside Apple — so we didn’t advertise the fact. But I expect we contributed about two million lines of code, to hundreds of Open Source projects, over the course of that year. A lot of gratitude — but it wasn’t collective, and so Apple was still faulted for “using Open Source code, but never contributing back”. We fixed at least 15 major gcc bugs, for example. You have no idea.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I suspect this (Apple employees contributing individually) is still often the case. Apple is all over the place on their general attitude towards open source, but they’re notoriously extremely secretive. About almost everything that isn’t in a press release, curated announcement or publication, or required by law. Loudly proclaiming their investment in open source, without some corresponding PR goal, is essentially free tea leaves for people to speculate about What They’re Building In There. I’m likewise sure there are some handshake agreements between many open source maintainers and Apple-paid contributors to just… not spill those beans.
- kccqzy 5y ago
  Apple chose the secrecy culture. It's also their problem if their contributions are so secretive that they have a PR problem about not enough OSS contributions.
imwally 5y ago
A list of certified UNIX operating systems: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
- vmlinuz 5y ago
  I'm quite surprised to see that OpenServer is still on that list, and Solaris isn't...
  - manbart 5y ago
    I think that IBM z/OS is the strangest entry on the list. It’s also notable that Hawaii EulerOS is a Linux distro based on CentOS
    - azinman2 5y ago
      So Huawei got Unix certification for Linux? If so, that’s a pretty big deal!
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        They did, but (IIRC, and this is an old memory) to make GNU/Linux pass certification you have to hack it up quite a bit; lots of GNU tools have POSIX modes that significantly change how they behave - things like du defaulting to 1024-byte units by default but using 512-byte units if you set POSIXLY_CORRECT because parts of the standard are, um, "interesting". But yes, neat to know that it can be done.
      - krylon 5y ago
        AFAIR, Red Hat once had a version of their system certified, too. But it's not as useful as one might think - the certification applies to a specific distro and release only, so it needs to be renewed with every new release.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Thanks z/OS UNIX System Services. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-zos-unix-system-services https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-zos...
saagarjha 5y ago
> But it was a red letter day when the header files passed testing, and we celebrated by going out to IL6 — the informal name for the BJ’s restaurant, just off the Apple campus. IL7, I thought? IL6 is an existing building at the southernmost end of the campus.
- cperciva 5y ago
  Did IL6 exist at the time? I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist".
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    I think so?
  - CharlesW 5y ago
    > Did IL6 exist at the time? It did, so I'm guessing it was just a mistake. I recall Pepper Mill/BJ's being referred to as either "R&D 7" or "IL 7". > I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist". Yep!
    - donavanm 5y ago
      Concur. I had also always heard of it as “IL7” when I worked in IL1 & 6. An aside, the balcony & gamesroom in IL2 was a nice little escape for an afternoon beverage as well.
- olliej 5y ago
  IL7, I'm guessing typo, or they've escaped for long enough to forget exact details :D
- Hayvok 5y ago
  BJs is indeed referred to as IL7 and the restaurant even had an official-looking “IL7” placard on the rear entrance. Hate to nit-pick the story at all though, it’s a great. Stories like this floated all around Apple, and I stopped being surprised by them after awhile. That level of focus, drive, and accomplishment by just a handful of engineers was in the company’s bones.
ltbarcly3 5y ago
Am I doing the math right? If he got $10M in stock in 2005, that is worth approximately $1.3B now?
- sgerenser 5y ago
  If you look up thread there’s posts where he indicated he never got the stock he was promised.
- masklinn 5y ago
  As other comments noted, he (and his team) apparently got shafted.
  - znpy 5y ago
    Classic Apple
ralfd 5y ago
Archive / mirror: https://archive.fo/iWgqx https://archive.fo/iWgqx
bluedino 5y ago
How would it have been $200 million to remove the UNIX logo from the marketing materials?
- lionkor 5y ago
  a 200 million lawsuit plus removing the unix stuff
bitigchi 5y ago
It's pleasant to hear that lots of FOSS software benefited from this effort.

456 points by azinman2 5y ago

> By this time, I knew pretty much every one of the 13 million lines of kernel code in the Mac OS X kernel. narcissism overload; stopped reading there

puffoflogic 5y ago

It is interesting how much weight the author puts on bypassing process and bureaucracy to the success of the project.

weatherlight 5y ago
He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Most people? (Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in general).
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense to you. To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people interact with other people. Social rules? Those that "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?... Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid, but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal consequences - it's about the principle. But total abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help people break that law should there be a need for it. Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society, sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and sometimes the other way around. To be honest, I have no idea where the line between "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist" actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I guess. When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without telling me why. I think they were interpreting my questions as undermining their authority, which ironically made them less likely to actually answer me, but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to work in a field where I generally don't have to do things that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents were warning me about back then ;)). Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority personality trait".
      - BurningPenguin 5y ago
        Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    I find people will go with the flow and basically follow orders. Most people won't shake the boat.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit of course https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-between-cattle-temperament-and-autism/ https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-bet...
microtherion 5y ago
Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work. Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.
olliej 5y ago
I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor" bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable response. Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they will have many restrictions on any changes going in, including feature work from their own team, let alone some random potentially behavior changing ones. Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even if making tests is hard. There have been a few times where I have spent longer (sometimes way longer) building the infrastructure to make a test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the time there's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently important that they might want to bypass such.
xtat 5y ago
The view from here is that doing anything at big SV tech is way more politics than tech.

chrisseaton 5y ago

> I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high level, ever again, in the future. I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?

bitwize 5y ago
Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly he fucked up, just to spite him. "You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to discharge fleeting grudges.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > how badly he fucked up I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it? And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    > I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it? If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO consider you someone to count on again? > And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs? Because he built this industry.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. Are you under the impression that for example lawyers are fired every time they lose a case and a company has to pay out?

Lammy 5y ago

> The lawsuit was filed because the owner of Mac OS X Server kept putting “UNIX” on the web site, and all other marketing collateral for the Server product. Like https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750 https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750 "First of all, [Mac OS X] is Unix-based, as you know. What you may not know is that Apple has become the #1 supplier of Unix in the world — bigger than Sun; bigger than Linux; bigger than anyone! But we don't want to rest on that. We think we have one of the best versions of Unix out there — Jagwire makes it even better with a whole bunch of cool new Unix things." As the OP implies (missing Tiger), Leopard was the first certified version: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-receives-unix-03-certification/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-rec...

willis936 5y ago
Doesn't linux stand for "linux is not unix"?
- rovr138 5y ago
  No. >Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical.[13] >In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. So, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds.[13] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux". >To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide (audio speaker iconlisten (help·info)) with the kernel source code.[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    When crossing languages shouldn’t pronunciation change?

AceJohnny2 5y ago

> We bought begrudging buy-in from Mike Smith (yes, that* Mike Smith) by having him rewrite the file locking code.* Anyone know who is that Mike Smith?

drewg123 5y ago
I suspect its the Mike Smith who was a FreeBSD committer and core team member 20-ish years ago.
- ksec 5y ago
  This? [1] May be worth its own HN submission. But that mail, 20 years ago reads to me the problem with today's open source aren't that much different to now. [1] https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-s-not-fun-anymore-mike-resigns-from-core https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-s-no...

nsxwolf 5y ago

Wow, $10 million in Apple stock... Reading this, I feel like I've done things that were this big... or a decent fraction of it... and never got so much as a thank you

Scramblejams 5y ago
Sounds like he didn't get it: https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-better-employer-from-an-employee-s-perspective https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-better-employer-from-...
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  Oh wow. What a blow. The way I make myself feel better about all the stocks and options I was never offered in my career is by assuming something like that would have happened to me.
- fyrabanks 5y ago
  I'm extremely curious about the "untimely death trigger conditions" part at the end...
- Jedd 5y ago
  I think this may be a more relevant link to the 'I didn't get paid' - and explains a little more of the veiled threats to whomever Simon Patience is from your link. https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ralfd 5y ago
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9 https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9 Apple Vice President Core OS Software (2002–2014)
  - xtracto 5y ago

coldtea 5y ago

Interesting part: > We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community — particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests. You have absolutely no idea how much Apple contributed to the Open Source community, as part of this project, because it was a secret project — at least to people outside Apple — so we didn’t advertise the fact. But I expect we contributed about two million lines of code, to hundreds of Open Source projects, over the course of that year. A lot of gratitude — but it wasn’t collective, and so Apple was still faulted for “using Open Source code, but never contributing back”. We fixed at least 15 major gcc bugs, for example. You have no idea.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
eyelidlessness 5y ago
I suspect this (Apple employees contributing individually) is still often the case. Apple is all over the place on their general attitude towards open source, but they’re notoriously extremely secretive. About almost everything that isn’t in a press release, curated announcement or publication, or required by law. Loudly proclaiming their investment in open source, without some corresponding PR goal, is essentially free tea leaves for people to speculate about What They’re Building In There. I’m likewise sure there are some handshake agreements between many open source maintainers and Apple-paid contributors to just… not spill those beans.
kccqzy 5y ago
Apple chose the secrecy culture. It's also their problem if their contributions are so secretive that they have a PR problem about not enough OSS contributions.

imwally 5y ago

A list of certified UNIX operating systems: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

vmlinuz 5y ago
I'm quite surprised to see that OpenServer is still on that list, and Solaris isn't...
- manbart 5y ago
  I think that IBM z/OS is the strangest entry on the list. It’s also notable that Hawaii EulerOS is a Linux distro based on CentOS
  - azinman2 5y ago
    So Huawei got Unix certification for Linux? If so, that’s a pretty big deal!
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      They did, but (IIRC, and this is an old memory) to make GNU/Linux pass certification you have to hack it up quite a bit; lots of GNU tools have POSIX modes that significantly change how they behave - things like du defaulting to 1024-byte units by default but using 512-byte units if you set POSIXLY_CORRECT because parts of the standard are, um, "interesting". But yes, neat to know that it can be done.
    - krylon 5y ago
      AFAIR, Red Hat once had a version of their system certified, too. But it's not as useful as one might think - the certification applies to a specific distro and release only, so it needs to be renewed with every new release.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Thanks z/OS UNIX System Services. https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-zos-unix-system-services https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-zos...

saagarjha 5y ago

> But it was a red letter day when the header files passed testing, and we celebrated by going out to IL6 — the informal name for the BJ’s restaurant, just off the Apple campus. IL7, I thought? IL6 is an existing building at the southernmost end of the campus.

cperciva 5y ago
Did IL6 exist at the time? I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist".
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I think so?
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Did IL6 exist at the time? It did, so I'm guessing it was just a mistake. I recall Pepper Mill/BJ's being referred to as either "R&D 7" or "IL 7". > I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist". Yep!
  - donavanm 5y ago
    Concur. I had also always heard of it as “IL7” when I worked in IL1 & 6. An aside, the balcony & gamesroom in IL2 was a nice little escape for an afternoon beverage as well.
olliej 5y ago
IL7, I'm guessing typo, or they've escaped for long enough to forget exact details :D
Hayvok 5y ago
BJs is indeed referred to as IL7 and the restaurant even had an official-looking “IL7” placard on the rear entrance. Hate to nit-pick the story at all though, it’s a great. Stories like this floated all around Apple, and I stopped being surprised by them after awhile. That level of focus, drive, and accomplishment by just a handful of engineers was in the company’s bones.

ltbarcly3 5y ago

Am I doing the math right? If he got $10M in stock in 2005, that is worth approximately $1.3B now?

sgerenser 5y ago
If you look up thread there’s posts where he indicated he never got the stock he was promised.
masklinn 5y ago
As other comments noted, he (and his team) apparently got shafted.
- znpy 5y ago
  Classic Apple

ralfd 5y ago

Archive / mirror: https://archive.fo/iWgqx https://archive.fo/iWgqx

bluedino 5y ago

How would it have been $200 million to remove the UNIX logo from the marketing materials?

lionkor 5y ago
a 200 million lawsuit plus removing the unix stuff

bitigchi 5y ago

It's pleasant to hear that lots of FOSS software benefited from this effort.