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That explains why they got it UNIX certified back then, but couldn't they stop advertising macOS as UNIX and stop getting it certified? They even changed the na
by mdasen 1y ago
That explains why they got it UNIX certified back then, but couldn't they stop advertising macOS as UNIX and stop getting it certified? They even changed the name from Mac OS X to macOS since then.
- randall 1y agothere’s no downside as far as i’m aware.
- hopelite 1y agoFamous last words
- mdasen 1y agoThere isn't much downside, but it probably involves a small amount of money (paid for the certification) and it means spending time making sure that everything remains 100% within spec. There's lots of little edge cases where BSDs differ from the spec and it means that Apple needs to take care not to drift from the spec.
- al_borland 1y agoApple remaining in spec sounds like a good thing from a compatibility point of view. Am I missing something? I’m not sure why it’s coming off like people are complaining about this?
- Analemma_ 1y agoIt’s a spec that doesn’t really matter in practice. Like some other comments said, Linux, BSD and Solaris are “Unix but not Unix(tm)”, and nobody cares.
- jorams 1y agoAs pointed out by amiga386 both here[1] and in earlier posts, macOS is not actually compliant with the Unix spec and never has been. This has apparently not been a hindrance for the certification of every single non-compliant version. Unix certification for Apple might not involve anything other than payment. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45239534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45239534
- bawolff 1y agoPresumably certification costs money (?)
- monkeyelite 1y agoProbably a small amount especially when they just need to tell them what changed
- bawolff 1y agoGiven how little their target market cares about being a "real" unix, a small amount is probably more than the benefit it brings in.
- monkeyelite 1y agoWe are talking about it.
- bawolff 1y agoTalk is cheap.
- monkeyelite 1y agoIn marketing, getting others to talk about you is not cheap. I don’t know what to tell you. Pick your theory: A) apple does it for no reason and it is a waste of money B) they do it because they are aware or benefits that outweighs the small certification cost
- crazygringo 1y agoThat's my question too, why continue to bother? Apple doesn't even have any separate "Server" OS anymore. I can't find anything mentioning UNIX on any apple.com marketing pages. I guess it's just, might as well keep it going, as an option for future marketing if ever needed. Maybe it helps the salespeople in some enterprise deals? I mean, if it doesn't really cost anything to keep it.
- pjmlp 1y agoWorkstations, although I wouldn't consider the existing alternatives much of a proper workstation.
- kstrauser 1y agoMy (wholly unsupported) guess is that there are government or megacorp bids somewhere for Unix systems for employees, and this checks that box. The buyer could update their requirements, but why do that when you can just make your vendor jump through the hoop?
- drob518 1y agoProbably a government contract.
- PrairieFire 1y agoI think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.
- monkeyelite 1y agoThis also doesn’t explain anything? Is getting Unix certified a jobs principle or a requirement to be a “spiritual successor”?
- pjmlp 1y agoJobs was very much anti-UNIX and is relatively easy to find it out. NeXTSTEP had to support UNIX, because that was the workstation market they were after. However notice how everything relevant for NeXT products was based on Objective-C userspace tooling and frameworks.
- hollandheese 1y agoI think you mean literal successor. It's descended from NeXT's codebase. Mac OS X 10.0 was basically NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM.
- spijdar 1y agoThere's a "ship of theseus" problem with this idea. There's enough different about OS X (different kernel and BSD base, different display server, different driver stack) that I think it's fair to describe it as a separate OS, yet clearly a lot _is_ directly taken from NS, especially the ObjC/application layer stuff. The waters are further muddled by the existence of Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0, which are much more clearly "NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM". I don't think anyone outside the original OS X development team really knows just how much code was kept vs scrapped for the start of OS X development. Given that NS/OS was based on USL-encumbered BSD, it seems likely to me that nothing from the original NS kernel was kept for that, at a minimum.
- hollandheese 1y ago
- mrweasel 1y agoI obviously don't know, but I could easily imagine that Apples legal team has flagged it as a potential risk and the cost of keep the certification up to date is minimal, compared to some imagined risk. Safer to pay the fee, and not having to worry about someone at Apple accidentally calling macOS a Unix system in public. Also, Apple is a huge company, there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development. Better to not be that person and just rubberstamp the invoice from The Open Group. If management disagree, they can make the call, but they won't because the cost is to small for them to deal with.
- astrange 1y agoThe cost isn't negligible. The OS team at Apple is smaller than you'd think and has a tight schedule that cannot ever miss a ship date. Basically anything that uses anyone's attention has to be important. > there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development. And one way that's managed is to have a DRI system which (ideally) prevents this from happening.
- btown 1y agoNot at Apple and don't have any knowledge here, but I'd imagine that the UNIX test suite, ever since it began passing, has been a useful set of additional regression tests even outside the certification context. Does anyone want to be the person that removes regression tests from active use, only to be responsible when something breaks that would have been caught by that test? Far easier to just fix your code so the test passes. (And for many years, OS X then macOS had a reputation for being rock-solid, capable of going much longer betwen restarts, going into BSOD much less frequently than Windows would. Having a set of third-party tests certainly didn't hurt this!)