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Isn’t the difference here that Linux was never trying to claim UNIX certification?

"""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."""

ah, yes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

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 :(

Yup. And why is UUCP still in there? I mean, yes I have used it, so far back that the docs were written in Quenya. But requiring it now?

Btw, MacOS 27 (the current version) still has UUCP.

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.

If you want to start a new trend, you should do this with FIPS 140, which has to be recertified every year. "Apple crypto is no longer FIPS certified"

Even better, last year's 26 releases are still undergoing the process.

This is what flagging is for.

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.

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

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.

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.

Yep linked page is active certification rather than historical.

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).

SFU ended in XP/2003. Vista/2008 had SUA

Proof? I couldnt find anything to that effect.

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"

-- Rob Pike

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.

Caring about which systems are branded UNIX is like caring about which NBA player was paid to endorse a particular brand of athletic footwear.

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.

it's "silently" never left. :)

Shit. Gonna have to make MacOS the top priority so osjdosnxkwjdk centers my software in their mind.

Thanks for explaining.

That grep/sed difference on mac caused me issues so many times, always thought it was just Apple doing their own thing. I didn't realize it was a spec thing.

The index page seems to only list the status of current OS versions.

Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.

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.

macOS is still very much registered: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm

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.

The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades.

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.

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?

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.

I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.

It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.

Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.

I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style.

In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.

What would that going away look like?

It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on.

Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.

It would be marvelous to see GNU/Linux certified as a UNIX specifically with rms’s preferred GNU/Linux as the name.

From that Wayback page, it looks like only one version of macOS is certified at any one time: the latest version. Since macOS Golden Gate was only recently released, perhaps it's a process blip and we'll see Golden Gate listed soon.

26 is in UNIX 03, if you use the pulldown

Unix? What's this?

Usage and quality are not particularly correlated, though.

I'm not speaking about the default login shell, which is indeed zsh, but what /bin/sh points to.

Indeed it is one in the same. The middle layer of MacOS has been rotting for years, the introduction of gatekeeper and SIP has made downloading and running programs or observing your system a pain. Software developers are being pushed toward App models and many other examples exist. For people who simply need a computer that works MacOS is moving futher away from that goal with every release.

> make shit up

When it's about the fruit company, is there a difference? Unless it's for the eyes of the beholden i.e., le iFans.

They are, when used against the user.