3 ms·

Apple's macOS Unix certification is a lie

43 points by lukastyrychtr 2y ago

p_ing 2y ago
> The cold and harsh truth is that literally nobody but a few nerds like us care about this, and even then the level of care we display is minute. The author says this, but oh boy you should see how many individuals on /r/macos hinge on "It's good cus UNIX!", not that they understand what a UNIX is or where to find one. The certification isn't useful. Apple doesn't sell to the types of organizations/governments that would care. And macOS is so limiting in what you can do with it in comparison to not-UNIXes, branding it UNIX is a waste of time.
- Grosvenor 2y ago
  At one point in the 2000's Apple was leaning heavily on its UNIX brand. They sold big clusters of Xserves to universities for research projects. It was all over their keynotes and website copy. They made a big deal about cancer researchers using OSX. Then like always with Steve Jobs when he didn't feel the love back ($$$) he dumped it and never even thought about it again.
  - scrlk 2y ago
    "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" is one of the best Apple ads from that era: https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf
    - Grosvenor 2y ago
      What is with the spacing there? "UNIX........boxes". Very un-Apple. But damn I miss this era of Apple. Great ad.
      - wtallis 2y ago
        That ad was a two-page spread in printed magazines. The extra spacing was to account for the binding not laying flat.
  - pinewurst 2y ago
    I still know a bunch of cancer researchers who use OSX/MacOS. Do they care about formal Unix certification? Not in the least.
  - rezmason 2y ago
    In case it bears mentioning, the rationale behind this was that the migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was complex, and needed to be justified. Establishing OS X as more stable than Mac OS 9 was an important argument for that push. "Mac OS X is more stable!" "How stable is it?" "Well, it's built on top of an established workhorse or something you've never heard of!" "Gosh! Take my $129!"
- EPWN3D 2y ago
  They absolutely do sell to those organizations and governments. Otherwise they wouldn't bother maintaining a conforming, byzantine test suite. It's a checkbox that's useful for business purposes rather than technical ones, just like FIPS.
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    Correct. I used to work alongside folks who did research and operations at places like JPL and JHU’s APL. They very much cared about things like UNIX. (They also really enjoyed having computers that ran Mac, Windows, and Linux back when that was much more a given for someone to do.) There’s this idea floating out there, and it’s been out there for a long time, that serious academic/research work isn’t to be found on the Mac, or that you can’t run whatever software you want (you absolutely can). These ideas do not track reality.
wtallis 2y ago
I suspect there are exactly zero customers (of Apple or anyone else) who care to nitpick like this over strict adherence—out of the box—to any version of a UNIX specification. Anyone who really needs to guarantee that their application will be immediately compatible with a new system is simply going to stick with whatever vendor they're already running it on and demand that vendor maintain bug-compatibility with their older versions.
lilyball 2y ago
I have to ask: so what? Most of the stuff here is rather specific to the test suite conflicting with security or features and does not adversely users or developers who care about UNIX behavior (SIP is really the only thing that may get in the way, but anyone who cares can disable it). For example, the fact that spotlight might update file access times is presumably not itself a violation of the UNIX standard, it's just something the test suite isn't expecting. The weirdest thing here is the uucp stuff, but that's an obsolete and rather dead technology so I see no reason to complain about macOS not giving those binaries the setuid bit, especially when the workaround so trivial.
nullpoint420 2y ago
Most of the issues are with the default user space and configuration. Maybe they should certify Darwin w/ a FreeBSD user space and HFS+ filesystem instead? The certification made sense during the late 90s and early 2000s. It made it easy to port most Unix software of the day to Mac OS X. Which then led it to become a major selling point for researchers in academia, those of whom were users of competing commercial Unix operating systems.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kragen 2y ago
These violations obliterate that the central promise of Unix—having a convenient, easy-to-use system that gives users great power over their computer. The control that you always have over a real Unix system is, in the Apple world, entirely illusory. Even basic debugging facilities like core dumps don't work! You're confined to a sandbox.
kittikitti 2y ago
I genuinely cared that MacOS billed itself as Unix and this was illuminating for me. The red flags were there, it doesn't even have an official package manager.
- wtallis 2y ago
  > The red flags were there, it doesn't even have an official package manager. I think you may have several other misconceptions about what Unix means.
orf 2y ago
Let’s break down the serious issues: - irrelevant, ancient unix-to-unix networking commands (who cares, who the fuck uses this[1]) - core dumps (who cares - enable it if needed) - file access time may be slow to update (who cares) - timeout coalescing issues with the test suite when running file access time tests (who cares) - FS case sensitivity (quirky at best) I mean… it’s not a lie. I can run plenty of Unix software on MacOS just fine. This says more about the relevance of the certification than it does about MacOS. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP
nimish 2y ago
Yeah, it's just a sparkling OS. This is also a lazy criticism. If the definition of UNIX is "certified by The Open Group according to the rules" then it's a UNIX. Your issue is with the certification criteria, not Apple. Go complain to the certifying body instead.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
daft_pink 2y ago
"the ancient times of 2004” - now I feel old

43 points by lukastyrychtr 2y ago

> The cold and harsh truth is that literally nobody but a few nerds like us care about this, and even then the level of care we display is minute. The author says this, but oh boy you should see how many individuals on /r/macos hinge on "It's good cus UNIX!", not that they understand what a UNIX is or where to find one. The certification isn't useful. Apple doesn't sell to the types of organizations/governments that would care. And macOS is so limiting in what you can do with it in comparison to not-UNIXes, branding it UNIX is a waste of time.

Grosvenor 2y ago
At one point in the 2000's Apple was leaning heavily on its UNIX brand. They sold big clusters of Xserves to universities for research projects. It was all over their keynotes and website copy. They made a big deal about cancer researchers using OSX. Then like always with Steve Jobs when he didn't feel the love back ($$$) he dumped it and never even thought about it again.
- scrlk 2y ago
  "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" is one of the best Apple ads from that era: https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf
  - Grosvenor 2y ago
    What is with the spacing there? "UNIX........boxes". Very un-Apple. But damn I miss this era of Apple. Great ad.
    - wtallis 2y ago
      That ad was a two-page spread in printed magazines. The extra spacing was to account for the binding not laying flat.
- pinewurst 2y ago
  I still know a bunch of cancer researchers who use OSX/MacOS. Do they care about formal Unix certification? Not in the least.
- rezmason 2y ago
  In case it bears mentioning, the rationale behind this was that the migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was complex, and needed to be justified. Establishing OS X as more stable than Mac OS 9 was an important argument for that push. "Mac OS X is more stable!" "How stable is it?" "Well, it's built on top of an established workhorse or something you've never heard of!" "Gosh! Take my $129!"
EPWN3D 2y ago
They absolutely do sell to those organizations and governments. Otherwise they wouldn't bother maintaining a conforming, byzantine test suite. It's a checkbox that's useful for business purposes rather than technical ones, just like FIPS.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  Correct. I used to work alongside folks who did research and operations at places like JPL and JHU’s APL. They very much cared about things like UNIX. (They also really enjoyed having computers that ran Mac, Windows, and Linux back when that was much more a given for someone to do.) There’s this idea floating out there, and it’s been out there for a long time, that serious academic/research work isn’t to be found on the Mac, or that you can’t run whatever software you want (you absolutely can). These ideas do not track reality.

wtallis 2y ago

I suspect there are exactly zero customers (of Apple or anyone else) who care to nitpick like this over strict adherence—out of the box—to any version of a UNIX specification. Anyone who really needs to guarantee that their application will be immediately compatible with a new system is simply going to stick with whatever vendor they're already running it on and demand that vendor maintain bug-compatibility with their older versions.

lilyball 2y ago

I have to ask: so what? Most of the stuff here is rather specific to the test suite conflicting with security or features and does not adversely users or developers who care about UNIX behavior (SIP is really the only thing that may get in the way, but anyone who cares can disable it). For example, the fact that spotlight might update file access times is presumably not itself a violation of the UNIX standard, it's just something the test suite isn't expecting. The weirdest thing here is the uucp stuff, but that's an obsolete and rather dead technology so I see no reason to complain about macOS not giving those binaries the setuid bit, especially when the workaround so trivial.

nullpoint420 2y ago

Most of the issues are with the default user space and configuration. Maybe they should certify Darwin w/ a FreeBSD user space and HFS+ filesystem instead? The certification made sense during the late 90s and early 2000s. It made it easy to port most Unix software of the day to Mac OS X. Which then led it to become a major selling point for researchers in academia, those of whom were users of competing commercial Unix operating systems.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kragen 2y ago

These violations obliterate that the central promise of Unix—having a convenient, easy-to-use system that gives users great power over their computer. The control that you always have over a real Unix system is, in the Apple world, entirely illusory. Even basic debugging facilities like core dumps don't work! You're confined to a sandbox.

kittikitti 2y ago

I genuinely cared that MacOS billed itself as Unix and this was illuminating for me. The red flags were there, it doesn't even have an official package manager.

wtallis 2y ago
> The red flags were there, it doesn't even have an official package manager. I think you may have several other misconceptions about what Unix means.

orf 2y ago

Let’s break down the serious issues: - irrelevant, ancient unix-to-unix networking commands (who cares, who the fuck uses this[1]) - core dumps (who cares - enable it if needed) - file access time may be slow to update (who cares) - timeout coalescing issues with the test suite when running file access time tests (who cares) - FS case sensitivity (quirky at best) I mean… it’s not a lie. I can run plenty of Unix software on MacOS just fine. This says more about the relevance of the certification than it does about MacOS. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

nimish 2y ago

Yeah, it's just a sparkling OS. This is also a lazy criticism. If the definition of UNIX is "certified by The Open Group according to the rules" then it's a UNIX. Your issue is with the certification criteria, not Apple. Go complain to the certifying body instead.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

daft_pink 2y ago

"the ancient times of 2004” - now I feel old