I see macOS 26 listed under the Unix 03 standard. Was macOS 27 listed and then removed? The submission title + site contents combined do not give enough info to assess what exactly was silently removed.
The this is much ado about nothing. Every single entry on the page you linked goes to its product page with the exact Unix standard it is certified as. Once you select a filter, you cannot get back to unfiltered list without the back button on the browser.
This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.
Well Unix as a standard is completely dead. macOS as a Unix is completely dead. I expect another branch in the already complicated as hell tree of Unixes.
macOS as Unix is not dead – the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).
We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier.
If you're using a language compiled to bytecode or interpreted, then the OS and arch don't matter a whole lot (so long as you don't have to deal with Window's weird filename conventions or other oddnesses). If you're using compiled-to-bytecode languages, there's a huge advantage in forcing your code to be cross-arch safe from day one, lest ye accidentally end up with something that can only build on the exact CPU in your devs' laptops or can only run on the flavor of WSL you're using that year.
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
Why not develop on the same env? I mean if I were you my macbook would just be an ssh client to the x86-64 dev box that emulates the target env. So many advantages to offshoring the compute to some server (my preference is your own hardware ofc but theres flexibility in cloud). For one, the laptop is not getting hot just being a dummy ssh client. I can spill a coffee on it during a build and nothing happens, build goes on and I am just out a thin client I can replace immediately with anything with ssh installed, my cellphone included if I am so desperate.
I think he means macOS as official, certified Unix is dead.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
I would guess that your company isn’t actually interested in the UNIX compatibility specifically, more that they’re interested in laptops that can run a similar toolset.
They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
Does your company care about compatibility with UNIX® infrastructure or that it's compatible with Linux/BSD infrastructure?
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIX® - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIX® compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIX® and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIX® specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIX® and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIX® compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the ® everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIX® or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIX®" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
Totally off topic, but I'm replying to an old comment from 3 months ago about me getting a ticket to KGATLW due to a gmail name typo. ("Are you in the weights?")
Yes I went!
The other me had bought new tickets already by the time I tracked him down, and he said "Just keep them!" I took the Amtrak down from Oregon to the Bay Area, and my daughter and I met up with the other me for drinks before the concert at the Frost Amphitheater. GREAT time, tons of fun. Wouldn't have been on my list per se but as an impulsive fun thing to do it was fantastic!
Thanks for the reply. I remember the original message. I’m glad to see you went and had a good time even if the music wasn’t entirely your cup of tea.
Frost Amphitheater was right before the 24 election, then they had another SF show the day after the election. It was such a vibe shift. Frost was good times kraut rock. The next show was pure electronic anger. I’m not usually into their electronic music but I was that night.
Apparently it was for legal reasons. Apple was sued by the Open Group for describing Mac OS X as Unix® so they decided it was cheaper to bring it up to spec rather than to fight the lawsuit.
Enterpise espeically banking need standard and certification for reliability thats why , also certain Linux distro had certified before from China based on RHEL.
This is UNIX 03 certified OS with OSS alternatives from I gathered on internet :
- Apple OS X 10.7 - Apple macOS 26 , provide OSS Darwin 9 - Darwin 26
- Oracle Solaris 10 / 11 , provide OSS OpenSolais , then Illumos
- EulerOS 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7 and 8
- Inspur K-UX 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 5
- Inspur K-UX 3.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7
Linux can’t be listed, because Linux is not an operating system. It’s just a kernel. Unix specifies a whole operating system, which includes things like libc, cat, sh etc.
At best a distro could be certified. But that certification would not automatically extend to other distros.
More than 1 Linux distributions have been tested, passed, and listed in the past... But you need to pay again every year, and recertify every new version, and they didn't bother keeping it up.
I described them and what this meant in some depth in this 2023 article:
UNIX(tm) is no longer so relevant compared to the early days of OS X, when Linux was still in its infancy and the Unix certification undoubtedly gave Apple street cred among developers. Most developers these days target Linux for production. That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.
If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality.
SFU 1.0 and 2.0 relied on the MKS Toolkit by MKS/PTC, and SFU 3.0 later adopted the Interix (OpenNT) subsystem, which Microsoft acquired from Softway Systems in 1999.
The original POSIX Subsystem (psxss.exe) was Cutler's team who implemented a minimal POSIX.1 subsystem server alongside Win32 and OS/2. This was done primarily to satisfy US Federal Government procurement requirements (FIPS 151-2).
True, though to Microsoft's credit, the existence of the POSIX subsystem, even as a proof-of-concept, ensured the underlying kernel design supported the development of products like Interix, just as Windows on Alpha et al. ensured NT remained reasonably portable to future platforms like ARM, unlike say OS/2 where the only non-Intel release (for PowerPC) was basically a prerelease lacking core OS features like networking.
I think they are saying that "Unlike OS/2 itself (as a competing MS and then IBM product) had less thought and design went into it as a portable system, whereas NT was designed portable ground up"
That's correct, I put them in the same bucket though, as SUA was also based on Interix. So I consider those more as a rebranding, not something completely different like WSL.
IIRC SUA required recompilation. Putting the motto "Windows NT is a UNIX" to life was challenging, and introduction of incompatible SUA added multiple versions maintenance to the challenge.
Linux has been effectively Unix™ for me ever since the days when Dennis Ritchie indicated that he used Linux for everything on his web page. Late 2000s at the latest, maybe early 2000s. Unix enough for Dennis should be Unix enough for anyone.
I've been using Linux for 30+ years now and have always considered it free (as in speech) Unix. For my purposes, the difference was always more legal and philosophical than practical. Of course, I was a student back then and didn't need to run the commercial software of the time.
Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.
In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.
He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.
As for the original UNIX,
"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"
Yes, Unix = Linux for all intents and purposes in 2026. When I started in the early 90s, there was a galaxy of Unices - SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and many others people people don't even remember (ConvexOS anyone?). Heck, back then if you wanted to run a particular software for your industry, you might have to buy and install a specific proprietary Unix.
Today? It's all Linux or Windows (of course, now also Web/SaaS). All these different Unices have fallen by the wayside in favor of Linux. Yes, some are still around but the mindshare has been in Linux for the last 20 years.
I suspect you could rip out a ton of autoconf rules and no one would notice.
It wasn’t the Unix subsystem, but was a subsystem… it implemented the various Linux syscalls and binary format directly and forwarded them to the NT kernel, similarly to how the various win32 syscalls call into the NT kernel. So WSL was a “peer” of the win32 subsystem in the same way SFU or SUA was. But it wasn’t implemented “via” SUA.
Then in WSL2 they just switched to using a VM, which is way more boring but probably less work to keep up with (I’m sure the Linux kernel has a lot of stuff that needs translating/implementing and it’s simpler to just use a hypervisor)
Indeed. And, weirdly, there are items that show up by that 03 standard alongside macOS 26 (e.g. "HP-UX 11i V3 Release B.11.31") that also show on the front page. Is it a latest version kind of thing?
Yea — said as much in another comment. That looks like it could be the rule — for example your HP-UX version there appears to be the latest, final HP-UX.
I swear I've seen these "[Latest macOS release] does not appear in UNIX certification site" threads every year since the release of Big Sur in 2020.
It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.
Apple originally certified Mac OS X as a UNIX because they used the word UNIX all over their website and the Open Group came knocking; they decided it was cheaper/better for goodwill to do the conformance and pay the license fee than to fight the case in court.
Looking now, I see almost no uses of the word UNIX on the website except the docs archive, so I guess they’ve decided to abandon both the certification and the use of the UNIX trademark in macOS.
Maybe. But I don't remember seeing them use the word for the last decade, and the last-but-one release was certified. My first guess would be that it's too new, and hasn't passed certification yet.
It is strange now, but Apple made a big deal of marketing it as UNIX back then. Like at the front-page of apple.com. UNIX had a good reputation as solid and serious.
The reason Apple went to the trouble was not really a marketing exercise, but rather because a lot of U.S. government contacts required it, or a waver. This is the same reason versions of Windows were also UNIX certified. In neither case did this certification actually make them more "standard" in the way that the rules originally envisioned.
So Apple's use of UNIX in marketing was to make sure they never ran into that as a disqualified on a government contract. My impression is that those contracts largely no longer require that (one small measure of common sense has caught up).
This comment should be at the top. The title implies a non-issue: macOS silently disappears because the poster didn’t try to change the page's badly designed filter. The latest version of macOS probably will appear in months.
The whole UNIX certified thing is a bit odd to start with, but those addendums are really just saying that because the UNIX compliance tests are thoroughly stuck in the past, a bunch of security measures (that users expect to exist on modern systems) have to be disabled to run the test suite.
SIP is not some irrelevant detail, nor is it an obviously good "modern security practice". A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.
The hardware owner can modify it all they want, disable SIP. For a large swath of average and non-average users that will not be modifying the closed-source OS they're running, it is obviously good.
Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary, with source you're intended to tinker with.
AT&T was forbidden by its consent decree from productizing Unix. Licensees received the source code, on an as-is basis, with no official support from AT&T.
Sure, if by “you” you mean universities, Sun, DEC, IBM, etc.
As a non corporation end user with a sublicense from one of the above licensees (which is the apt analogy for an individual user in my opinion) you most certainly did not receive the source or have the rights to it.
I regard "traditional Unix" as the 1970s era. There were no sublicensees. You bought the source code from AT&T. That was the only option.
You then likely hacked the source code to make it work on your machine.
I can understand that others might include the commercialization of the 1980s and the Unix wars as part of "traditional Unix", but even then, my IRIX system ca. 1990 supported end-user kernel extensions, to handle new types of devices. Our imaging hardware was not "connected with well-defined text-based interfaces".
Sure, but that just means UNIX vendors had access to the source code.
It doesn't mean end users had access to the source code.
In fact, vendors would have been prohibited from distributing AT&T source code to customers who weren't themselves AT&T licensees, just as CSRG was prohibited from distributing BSD to customers who weren't licensees before 4.4BSD-Lite.
The same goes for most other proprietary source-available products. For example, game developers can't open source Unreal Engine projects even though Unreal Engine source licenses are available to end users for free.
You would absolutely normally get source to the vast majority of the unix components with a unix install.
At a bare minimum, you would almost have to have source to the vast majority of the kernel because there was no kernel modules. Sysgenning for a particular system involved compiling the kernel for that set of hardware.
I'm literally working on an early sun system emulator right now, heavily assisted by the standard sec tape that came with the standard software distribution of sunos, which has plenty of AT&T code.
As jeremyjh wrote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50032733 , "A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.". Since traditional Unix was source-available, with the expectation that people would hack on the source, I fully agree with jeremyjh's characterization.
I think you are talking about a later era in Unix history? The early Unix licensees were educational institutions and commercial sites, not vendors or resellers.
Every one of those academic and commercial end users got the source code.
> "In 1973, AT&T released Version 5 Unix and licensed it to educational institutions, and licensed 1975's Version 6 to companies for the first time, ... Anyone could purchase a license, but the terms were very restrictive; licensees only received the source code, on an as-is basis. ... Unix was entirely unsupported by AT&T"
From the same link, "Perkin-Elmer began distributing Wollongong Unix for Interdata as Perkin-Elmer Edition 7, the first version supported by a computer company". That was in 1980.
So while yes, "Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary" and could not be redistributed to non-licensees, it was also provided with "full user control and manipulation of the OS", and not merely "connected with well-defined text-based interfaces", quoting jdiff at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50033080.
Also worth keeping in mind that macOS is intended for use with commercial third party software that’s repeatedly been proven untrustworthy, doing things like prodding system internals and installing dodgy kernel extensions where neither is warranted.
SIP is as much defense from the likes of Adobe and Google as it is from more traditional malware.
For now SIP can be disabled (on mac, not of course on iOS that is completely closed) but I wonder for how much. It's clear that the desire of Apple is to make macOS a closed system like iOS, installing third party software outside the AppStore is more and more difficult, with Gatekeeper that asks you to enter the system settings and warn about "potential insecure stuff" each time you want to run an application downloaded from the internet not signed by Apple (yes I know that if you disable SIP you can get rid of Gatekeeper as well).
I think that piece by piece Apple wants to go into direction of making macOS just a desktop version of iOS, that is closed and impossible to modify. They will use of course security as an excuse, the practical thing is that with iOS they succeeded because they went to the market with an OS that was already closed, but making users accept that in new version downloading a software from the internet and installing it it's no longer possible takes time. But they are getting there soon to me.
The reason why that won't happen (but more and more warning prompts all the time because of this modern world...) is because macOS is a self-hosted platform.
Apple _needs_ macOS as an unlocked OS at the very least as a development platform to develop their operating systems on. Not having the self-hosting requirements allows to tighten the security model a lot.
Notably, with a Unix terminal, a huge problem for sandboxing is how to determine permissions granularly, whereas a UI flow has significantly better answers to that.
"""POSIXLY_CORRECT (originally proposed as POSIX_ME_HARDER) is a historical environment variable used in GNU utilities to force strict compliance with the POSIX standard."""
the netbsd gallery (https://netbsd.org/gallery/) had a picture of somebody using that on windows xp (iirc) in order to compile pkgsrc packages in a "posix compliant" environment. the picture seem to be gone now :(
This comment made me feel awkward for two reasons.
First, Linux was never GNU - the GNU ecosystem has always been a significant part, but if you were obstinate enough, you could get away without using any GNU tools (which is even easier today).
Second, you give just two examples. A few years ago we had a trend to rewrite everything in Rust with these newer tools usually not being part of the GNU project. Sure, you can replace everything now. However, most GNU tools are here to stay for a long time especially in enterprise distros where backward compatibility is important.
So no, Linux has never been GNU, and whatever fluctuations we had over decades with innumerable fights like egcs vs gcc etc., the GNU ecosystem is and will long be part of Linux distros.
Over time I see fewer and fewer gnu tools in my standard mainstream Linux. The tooling I used 25 years ago was far more gnu based than today, and crucially the FSF view of what free software is, and by extension the gnu public license, seems to be constantly retreating.
25 years ago it was reasonable to say the typical Linux machine was “gnu/linux”. Today it’s not.
The relevant text from the article, (the rest of this comment is a direct quote from the article):
So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Then, and only then, is your macOS 15.0 actually UNIX® 03-certified.
This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS – let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 – has implemented even half of these changes. I’m sure there is a small number of people who have System Integrity Protection disabled permanently, and an even smaller number of people who have enabled the root account, and an even smaller number of people who have done both of those things – but that’s it. All the other changes are far too obscure and specific to be of any use to anyone.
I had no idea there was a built-in way to make the filesystem case sensitive. My employer probably does not want me to spend time reinstalling my OS for this now but maybe next time I'm given a MacBook for a job I should do this...
Curiously, the iOS filesystem is case-sensitive. A bit of a trap for developers on macOS. I’d expect plenty of third-party stuff to break switching the system drive to case-sensitive.
You think that you do, like I thought that I did, but I doubt that you want it in reality. Last I checked, which was probably under a decade ago(?), there were a bunch of things on macOS that misbehave on a case-sensitive FS, both first- and third-party. I reinstalled same-day.
That’s a bit of a weird article and I’m not 100% sure what its point is.
> This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS – let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 – has implemented even half of these changes.
Well, maybe that means it doesn’t really matter and especially not to the extent that the author seems (?) to be making it out to be. If no one disables System Integrity Protection in order to be UNIX® 03-compliant, maybe that means that to the extent that people care about macOS being “a UNIX”, they don’t care specifically about the parts of the specification that are incompatible with System Integrity Protection.
The explanation I remember seeing many years ago, no idea how true it is, was that this was entirely about purchasing.
There were (are?) companies and especially parts of the government where it was pretty difficult/impossible to purchase anything that wasn’t on an official pre-approved list. Trying to get anything new added was a massive problem.
One of the things that was on the list was something like “a computer running Unix“. Tada. Macs now run Unix so you can easily buy them.
Like other people here, I really don’t think true compliance mattered to basically anyone for their actual use. The idea that it was just box checking so they were easier to buy in some institutional environments makes much more sense to me.
I can see that. Before linux, there were lots of versions of unix from all kinds of vendors.
I'll bet all kinds of government contracts needed some way to compare vendors bidding on a contract
for example:
- These ran UTX-32, Gould's version of Unix based on a BSD 4.2 kernel developed by Gould's UNIX development centre in Urbana-Champaign (IL) to support multiprocessor systems
- AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions.
- DG/UX 1.00, released by Data General in March 1985, was based on UNIX System V Release 2 with additions from 4.1BSD.
- HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a discontinued proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Xenix is based on the operating system UNIX System V, which Microsoft licensed from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s.
I won't be surprised if you will have to boot into recovery, disable SIP, come back to user-space and run those unsafe 'ls' and 'cat' commands you were trying to live dangerously with on '~/Library', and then go back to recovery again to renable SIP to stay safe. You may also have to do that to install every software you want to install and use on your (is it?) mac other than the ones that are from companies that had tied up with and signed Apple's USA certificaiton (i.e User Safety Alliance™; involving non-publicly disclosed deals), or from the smaller devs who were not small enough and could pay a few thousand dollars annually and sent Apple 3 kidneys annually to publish softwares with very reduced scope and access on the device/OS. The data transfer between your mac and those app endpoints will be so protected that even your own self-destructive hands and insufficient intellect won't be able to gather what is happening beneath the Apple's hardware hardcoded encryption. All for safety beyond the UNIX way. So not all surprising.
Have you ever considered, oh maybe using a Mac rather than making up complete bollocks(*)? Or perhaps looking up the well-documented and fully supported procedure for installing unsigned software? Or maybe noticing that the procedure is usually only needed for applications like FreeTube where the developer has a reason to remain anonymous? Yes, you can disable SIP. But you will struggle to find a need to do so.
If that’s what you get reading that comment then maybe ask your lawyer to pump some grey grease into the upper few inches next time you two are at a petrol err gas station.
> usually only needed for applications like FreeTube
No, looks like that won’t be sufficient. Pumping grey won’t be sufficient. Ask the lawyer to also do a “recent top posts on hn” search for you, assuming their marbles don’t yet melt at first sight of fruit company criticism/rant.
> you will struggle to find a need to do so.
Right. A member of the “you are holding it wrong” + “this is how it’s supposed to be used” genus spotted. Not your fault then. Here you go: yeah, you are right. Consider yours truly enlightened and in your immense intellectual debt.
197 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 13.6 ms ] threadIt was Tahoe, it’s since been removed.
The UNIX03 page still lists it, but I believe that’s a mistake.
macOS has been removed from the main register/list.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238930
This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIX® - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIX® compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIX® and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIX® specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIX® and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIX® compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the ® everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIX® or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIX®" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...
It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.
They were CentOS Linux derivatives.
Yes I went!
The other me had bought new tickets already by the time I tracked him down, and he said "Just keep them!" I took the Amtrak down from Oregon to the Bay Area, and my daughter and I met up with the other me for drinks before the concert at the Frost Amphitheater. GREAT time, tons of fun. Wouldn't have been on my list per se but as an impulsive fun thing to do it was fantastic!
Frost Amphitheater was right before the 24 election, then they had another SF show the day after the election. It was such a vibe shift. Frost was good times kraut rock. The next show was pure electronic anger. I’m not usually into their electronic music but I was that night.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
This is UNIX 03 certified OS with OSS alternatives from I gathered on internet :
- Apple OS X 10.7 - Apple macOS 26 , provide OSS Darwin 9 - Darwin 26
- Oracle Solaris 10 / 11 , provide OSS OpenSolais , then Illumos
- EulerOS 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7 and 8
- Inspur K-UX 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 5
- Inspur K-UX 3.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7
At best a distro could be certified. But that certification would not automatically extend to other distros.
More than 1 Linux distributions have been tested, passed, and listed in the past... But you need to pay again every year, and recertify every new version, and they didn't bother keeping it up.
I described them and what this meant in some depth in this 2023 article:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/17/unix-is-dead...
If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality.
Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.
The original POSIX Subsystem (psxss.exe) was Cutler's team who implemented a minimal POSIX.1 subsystem server alongside Win32 and OS/2. This was done primarily to satisfy US Federal Government procurement requirements (FIPS 151-2).
In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.
He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.
As for the original UNIX,
"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"
-- Rob Pike
Today? It's all Linux or Windows (of course, now also Web/SaaS). All these different Unices have fallen by the wayside in favor of Linux. Yes, some are still around but the mindshare has been in Linux for the last 20 years.
I suspect you could rip out a ton of autoconf rules and no one would notice.
If they are in fact dropping it, that’s why. But… Apple often “finishes” the enterprise features with a point release.
It is hard to find, unless one knows the technical details.
Then in WSL2 they just switched to using a VM, which is way more boring but probably less work to keep up with (I’m sure the Linux kernel has a lot of stuff that needs translating/implementing and it’s simpler to just use a hypervisor)
WSL 1.0 was a Drawbrige picoprocess.
Your confusion is natural among those that aren't into Windows programming.
Here are the links for the related information,
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge
WSL 1.0 architecture,
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
There's probably a high-nines percentage of Mac owners that have never configured their Mac to be Unix compliant, and never will.
People are so strange.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.
It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.
Even better, last year's 26 releases are still undergoing the process.
Looking now, I see almost no uses of the word UNIX on the website except the docs archive, so I guess they’ve decided to abandon both the certification and the use of the UNIX trademark in macOS.
So Apple's use of UNIX in marketing was to make sure they never ran into that as a disqualified on a government contract. My impression is that those contracts largely no longer require that (one small measure of common sense has caught up).
AT&T was forbidden by its consent decree from productizing Unix. Licensees received the source code, on an as-is basis, with no official support from AT&T.
As a non corporation end user with a sublicense from one of the above licensees (which is the apt analogy for an individual user in my opinion) you most certainly did not receive the source or have the rights to it.
You then likely hacked the source code to make it work on your machine.
I can understand that others might include the commercialization of the 1980s and the Unix wars as part of "traditional Unix", but even then, my IRIX system ca. 1990 supported end-user kernel extensions, to handle new types of devices. Our imaging hardware was not "connected with well-defined text-based interfaces".
It doesn't mean end users had access to the source code.
In fact, vendors would have been prohibited from distributing AT&T source code to customers who weren't themselves AT&T licensees, just as CSRG was prohibited from distributing BSD to customers who weren't licensees before 4.4BSD-Lite.
The same goes for most other proprietary source-available products. For example, game developers can't open source Unreal Engine projects even though Unreal Engine source licenses are available to end users for free.
At a bare minimum, you would almost have to have source to the vast majority of the kernel because there was no kernel modules. Sysgenning for a particular system involved compiling the kernel for that set of hardware.
I'm literally working on an early sun system emulator right now, heavily assisted by the standard sec tape that came with the standard software distribution of sunos, which has plenty of AT&T code.
As jeremyjh wrote at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50032733 , "A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.". Since traditional Unix was source-available, with the expectation that people would hack on the source, I fully agree with jeremyjh's characterization.
I think you are talking about a later era in Unix history? The early Unix licensees were educational institutions and commercial sites, not vendors or resellers.
Every one of those academic and commercial end users got the source code.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix :
> "In 1973, AT&T released Version 5 Unix and licensed it to educational institutions, and licensed 1975's Version 6 to companies for the first time, ... Anyone could purchase a license, but the terms were very restrictive; licensees only received the source code, on an as-is basis. ... Unix was entirely unsupported by AT&T"
From the same link, "Perkin-Elmer began distributing Wollongong Unix for Interdata as Perkin-Elmer Edition 7, the first version supported by a computer company". That was in 1980.
So while yes, "Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary" and could not be redistributed to non-licensees, it was also provided with "full user control and manipulation of the OS", and not merely "connected with well-defined text-based interfaces", quoting jdiff at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50033080.
SIP is as much defense from the likes of Adobe and Google as it is from more traditional malware.
I think that piece by piece Apple wants to go into direction of making macOS just a desktop version of iOS, that is closed and impossible to modify. They will use of course security as an excuse, the practical thing is that with iOS they succeeded because they went to the market with an OS that was already closed, but making users accept that in new version downloading a software from the internet and installing it it's no longer possible takes time. But they are getting there soon to me.
The reason why that won't happen (but more and more warning prompts all the time because of this modern world...) is because macOS is a self-hosted platform.
Apple _needs_ macOS as an unlocked OS at the very least as a development platform to develop their operating systems on. Not having the self-hosting requirements allows to tighten the security model a lot.
Notably, with a Unix terminal, a huge problem for sandboxing is how to determine permissions granularly, whereas a UI flow has significantly better answers to that.
Btw, MacOS 27 (the current version) still has UUCP.
the netbsd gallery (https://netbsd.org/gallery/) had a picture of somebody using that on windows xp (iirc) in order to compile pkgsrc packages in a "posix compliant" environment. the picture seem to be gone now :(
"1.12 Threads
1.12.1 Cancellation Points
Question 31: Which C stdio functions have cancellation points that occur when a thread is executing?"
https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=...
- The Linux kernel also has timer coalescing
- Linux also has lazy atime ('relatime') by default
- No Linux distro installs uucp by default, and certainly not suid
- Desktop distros will also run a file indexer of some sort
etc.
First, Linux was never GNU - the GNU ecosystem has always been a significant part, but if you were obstinate enough, you could get away without using any GNU tools (which is even easier today).
Second, you give just two examples. A few years ago we had a trend to rewrite everything in Rust with these newer tools usually not being part of the GNU project. Sure, you can replace everything now. However, most GNU tools are here to stay for a long time especially in enterprise distros where backward compatibility is important.
So no, Linux has never been GNU, and whatever fluctuations we had over decades with innumerable fights like egcs vs gcc etc., the GNU ecosystem is and will long be part of Linux distros.
25 years ago it was reasonable to say the typical Linux machine was “gnu/linux”. Today it’s not.
They were:
Inspur K-UX and Huawei’s EulerOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
These were both based on Red Hat.
So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Then, and only then, is your macOS 15.0 actually UNIX® 03-certified.
This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS – let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 – has implemented even half of these changes. I’m sure there is a small number of people who have System Integrity Protection disabled permanently, and an even smaller number of people who have enabled the root account, and an even smaller number of people who have done both of those things – but that’s it. All the other changes are far too obscure and specific to be of any use to anyone.
> This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS – let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 – has implemented even half of these changes.
Well, maybe that means it doesn’t really matter and especially not to the extent that the author seems (?) to be making it out to be. If no one disables System Integrity Protection in order to be UNIX® 03-compliant, maybe that means that to the extent that people care about macOS being “a UNIX”, they don’t care specifically about the parts of the specification that are incompatible with System Integrity Protection.
There were (are?) companies and especially parts of the government where it was pretty difficult/impossible to purchase anything that wasn’t on an official pre-approved list. Trying to get anything new added was a massive problem.
One of the things that was on the list was something like “a computer running Unix“. Tada. Macs now run Unix so you can easily buy them.
Like other people here, I really don’t think true compliance mattered to basically anyone for their actual use. The idea that it was just box checking so they were easier to buy in some institutional environments makes much more sense to me.
I'll bet all kinds of government contracts needed some way to compare vendors bidding on a contract
for example:
- These ran UTX-32, Gould's version of Unix based on a BSD 4.2 kernel developed by Gould's UNIX development centre in Urbana-Champaign (IL) to support multiprocessor systems
- AIX is based on UNIX System V with 4.3BSD-compatible extensions.
- DG/UX 1.00, released by Data General in March 1985, was based on UNIX System V Release 2 with additions from 4.1BSD.
- HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a discontinued proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Xenix is based on the operating system UNIX System V, which Microsoft licensed from AT&T Corporation in the late 1970s.
So OS X continuing that strategy early on would make perfect sense.
(*) My lawyers have asked me to point out that the case of Regina vs Sex Pistols (1977) established that this term refers to a priest in Old English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Bollocks,_Here%...).
> oh maybe using a Mac
If that’s what you get reading that comment then maybe ask your lawyer to pump some grey grease into the upper few inches next time you two are at a petrol err gas station.
> usually only needed for applications like FreeTube
No, looks like that won’t be sufficient. Pumping grey won’t be sufficient. Ask the lawyer to also do a “recent top posts on hn” search for you, assuming their marbles don’t yet melt at first sight of fruit company criticism/rant.
> you will struggle to find a need to do so.
Right. A member of the “you are holding it wrong” + “this is how it’s supposed to be used” genus spotted. Not your fault then. Here you go: yeah, you are right. Consider yours truly enlightened and in your immense intellectual debt.
* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3725.htm
The story behind macOS UNIX certification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
linux compatibility is way more relevant now.
And I'm not sure why it would be non-silently/loudly removed: is there an expectation of a press release or weblog post about non-certification?
For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.