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We're not talking "based on". We're saying Apple went through the hoops of the certification, paid their license money to The Open Group and is therefore "Real Unix". Posix 1003.1 compliant and all that. You can have a real unix, and use the trademark logos and all that if you write one in your mom's basement. It doesn't matter where your code base is from, it matters that you pass the tests.

By the way, FreeBSD did get certified once (in the mists of time--2.1?) but decided the effort to pass the certification tests and the expense of the license weren't worth it.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/unix.html
http://www.opengroup.org/testing/testsuites/unix.html

Wow, how many times does this need to be said before people stop claiming OS X isn't UNIX or UNIX-based? Leopard is a certified UNIX 03 product.

Just yesterday I was on some site (CNET, I think) and was going to flame someone who posted that "OSX is not LIKE Unix, it IS Unix." Sure, it has BSD wedged in there over Mach, I thought, but that's not Unix. It's POSIX compliant, but not Unix. It wasn't actually based on BSD.

Then I went to check my facts. I found this visual history, and OSX was nowhere on there. Great, I thought. I just need one more link to cement my position. Then I found the Open Group's list, and damn, I was wrong again. OSX 10.5 is Unix 03. Sucks to be me.

Uh, Mac OS X is certified standard UNIX.

According to the Single Unix Standard, only Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) can be considered "Unix". And only when deployed on Intel-based Macs. Previous versions must be considered like Linux: "Unix-like".

FWIW, Sun's operating system (SunOS) has been fairly close to Unix standards over its lifetime. In fact, the official version of System V release 4 was written by Sun and called SunOS 5, integrated into Solaris 2

Why is anyone even having this argument? GNU means "Gnu's NOT Unix" for a reason...

Naturally the poster focuses on Linux, but in fact GNOME has become a standard desktop for many Unix vendors. The fact that it has done this says a lot about Open Source as a superior way to develop non-proprietary software. When GNOME became common in the Unix world, it mostly displaced CDE, a non-proprietary desktop that was developed the old-fashioned way: a bunch of companies got together and formed a committee that wrote a spec, that various people went out and implemented.

GNOME has many flaws, but it's far superior to CDE. IMHO, that's because CDE is a child of politics and bureaucracy, while GNOME grew up organically, with various developers exercising their intelligence, insight, and creativity in order to make it a better product.

"Everybody assumes that the very name "Unix" has value, but, like autographs collectors specializing in French Existentialist writers, it would have value only to them.

It makes sense to put the ownership up in a trust holding where it can't ever be used in this kind of gambit again and I suspect that a foundation will be set up for that purpose."

It does have value, and its not owned by Novell - its owned by The Open Group. More info at unix org.

Some trademark attributions still say Novell (or even AT&T or Bell Labs), which is correct?

UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

• It must not be used as a generic term.
• It must not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed to use the mark.
• There are detailed guidelines referring to the visual presentation, form and manner of use.
• In editorial or articles, but not advertising the trade marks may be used without prior permission - provided that the rules in our Trademark Usage Guide are followed.

Here is the defiitive list of UNIXes. As you can see, SCO doesn't have anything past the UNIX 95 spec (Caldera OpenSewer), whereas there have been two major updates - UNIX 98 and UNIX 03.

"Everybody assumes that the very name "Unix" has value, but, like autographs collectors specializing in French Existentialist writers, it would have value only to them.

It makes sense to put the ownership up in a trust holding where it can't ever be used in this kind of gambit again and I suspect that a foundation will be set up for that purpose."

It does have value, and its not owned by Novell - its owned by The Open Group. More info at unix org.

Some trademark attributions still say Novell (or even AT&T or Bell Labs), which is correct?

UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

• It must not be used as a generic term.
• It must not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed to use the mark.
• There are detailed guidelines referring to the visual presentation, form and manner of use.
• In editorial or articles, but not advertising the trade marks may be used without prior permission - provided that the rules in our Trademark Usage Guide are followed.

Here is the defiitive list of UNIXes. As you can see, SCO doesn't have anything past the UNIX 95 spec (Caldera OpenSewer), whereas there have been two major updates - UNIX 98 and UNIX 03.

Are you aware that the Open Group Unix specifications go a lot further than POSIX? In effect, they are the next layer of standardization on top of POSIX and X11. Of couse, their user interface specification is the old and crusty CDE, so there is a lot of room for improvement.

Um, no. The certification from the Open Group covers the OS on a specific hardware platform. http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xy.htm lists AIX 5L twice for Unix '03, 5.2 on Power with specific patches and 5.3 on Power.

Aren't Single Unix Specifications available? Try http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/nfin dex.html . I suppose you will be asked to 'register' which means entering your name and something similar to your e-mail. I once entered an existing one, and it hasn't even done this e-mail any harm. As I understand it is a standard developed by formally the same committee as POSIX, and it is even formal replacement for it.

Apple clearly uses their BSD subsystem as a license-free compatibility layer- it's clear to me that proper POSIX compliance was not the most important factor in the system design. Then again, Linux isn't really POSIX compliant either- but that's another tale for another time.

As opposed to OS X, where not just POSIX compliance, but Single UNIX Standard v3 compliance is a tale for this October.

And note that said "license-free compatibility layer" is the layer at which, for example, file I/O and network I/O are implemented (except for the driver layer, which is done with I/O Kit, if you consider I/O Kit separate from "BSD" - it's in a separate subtree of the XNU source, along with the Mach code). It's not as if Carbon and Cocoa and Core Foundation are using their own separate calls to do file and network operations.

POSIX specifies what #include files are available and what macros they #define. (For example, limit.h).

Most operating systems tend to include other nonstandard stuff as well.

Anyhow, header files are inherently open source -- you can read them, you can edit/modify them (assuming you have write permission or can copy them to a local include directory). And more importantly, my understanding is that they're not copyrightable.

"UNIX-Like"?

True, if by "UNIX-Like" you mean "is UNIX". OS X is no less of a UNIX than any other UNIX. And OS X Leopard has officially been certified as UNIX 03:
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3 555.htm

People just can't get their idea, which they formed years ago, of what UNIX is out of their head. UNIX often has GUIs. UNIX can be very user friendly. UNIX doesn't require you to edit your documents in VI. Just because UNIX can power a mainframe calculating quantum physics, doesn't mean you can't take nudie pictures, of your girlfriend, easily with your iPhone running UNIX.

Serious question, is there anyone but Microsoft not using Unix?

Don't ever hard-code /dev/* into your program unless it's one of the devices specified by POSIX. Last time I checked, this limited it to /dev/null, /dev/console and /dev/tty.

"I read 'too much to bear' as taking too much system resources rather then 'too hard'.

In an embedded system dynamic linking can eat up scarce resources. Static linking is faster to load, faster to run, and takes up less ram."

It can also be used to free up resources. You only load what you need, as you need, then release it. It can also make startup times quicker, again, by only loading what you need at start. Use "RTLD_LAZY" - Runtime-load-lazy, so that you don't try to load everything at startup.

The real reason - the poster thinks its "too hard" to #include <dlfcn.h>, and insert one lousy call to dlopen().

More info here (with examples).

Lame, lame, lame ... tsk tsk tsk. Where's the "-1 I wish a dingo ate this article" mod?

"I read 'too much to bear' as taking too much system resources rather then 'too hard'.

In an embedded system dynamic linking can eat up scarce resources. Static linking is faster to load, faster to run, and takes up less ram."

It can also be used to free up resources. You only load what you need, as you need, then release it. It can also make startup times quicker, again, by only loading what you need at start. Use "RTLD_LAZY" - Runtime-load-lazy, so that you don't try to load everything at startup.

The real reason - the poster thinks its "too hard" to #include <dlfcn.h>, and insert one lousy call to dlopen().

More info here (with examples).

Lame, lame, lame ... tsk tsk tsk. Where's the "-1 I wish a dingo ate this article" mod?

Microsoft, Scrap Win32 and the NT Kernel. Build a new OS from the ground up. Make it a variant of Unix. Get it certified by The Open Group. Write the Kernel in C so it's stable. Make the OS modular so that the entire system won't go down when something crashes. Use a standardized filesystem like ext3. Run a compatibility layer as a non-privileged user for legacy support. Add a Sudoku game.

"50727 REG_SZ 50727-50727"

[...] cryptic keys such as: "{874aa5f2-3745-9e23-8a39-8972bcb1455e}" - care to tell me what that means???

Instead of having to hand-compute bitmasks, you use words.

While you CAN use regedt32 (regedit) to partially "manage" settings, the majority of the contents are useless as the registry is first and foremost designed to ONLY be managed via the various applications via the API it and Not by humans.

A 'good' webpage can be written in xhtml and include every scrap of CSS defined in the 2.0 standard. Unfortunately, the standards in question (including the older CSS specs) are ambiguous in some places and even if they weren't there is no browser that fully implements them. You can write a 100% standard and validated webpage that doesn't rendered properly (read according to standard) in any modern browser.

This is further complicated because the implementations are not just incomplete, but no two browsers implement the same parts. And if the browsers all implement a function, the ambiguity of the standard comes into play and you will often seen something rendered differently in each to a small or large degree.

I think whats really missing in the tar command is the '-z' due to it being a .gz

C99 has constant-size integer types. Previous versions might also. POSIX does too, apparently:

#include <stdint.h>

IMX, since about 7.3-7.4 PostgreSQL runs just as fast as MySQL under any significant load. It simply scales a lot better than MySQL seems to.

I will say that if you've just recently switched to PostgreSQL that you should be sure you read the documentation on configuring the server. While the default installation of MySQL is to use as much resources as necessary, PostgreSQL's default install is extremely conservative. By default it only allocated 1 MB (yes, one megabyte) for working memory. If you've got more than 32 MB of RAM, you're probably going to need to edit some config files to see any reasonable performance. Try running a VACUUM VERBOSE to determine how many pages or entries you need in your FSM. That's something that needs to be reconfigured on a production system after it's been in place for some time. If you do strange things like mass DELETEs or TRUNCATE TABLE, you'll also need to VACUUM more often.

The .org root DNS servers run on PostgreSQL, so it's not a problem with the RDBMS itself. Postgre has been repeatedly criticized for being so conservative with the default installation settings. I think they should have some configuration tools (in the Windows installer especially) that helps you to make somewhat more sane configuration settings.

The typical response from PostgreSQL devs on the subject is "yeah, if we turned off fsync on our DB it'd run real fast, too". This is partially why PostgreSQL seems to run slower than MySQL on databases that have lots of INSERT and DELETE queries.

I no longer see any reason to ever use MySQL. It's more popular, but I find PostgreSQL, Firebird, and SQLite cover the range of needs so much better. MySQL is great to learn on, but, well, it's just annoying once you really understand the first things about relational databases.

The short answer is, "Historical reasons";

And the longer answer is, POSIX says so:

There are two distinct ways in which the contents of the process image file may cause the execution to fail, distinguished by the setting of errno to either [ENOEXEC] or [EINVAL] (see the ERRORS section). In the cases where the other members of the exec family of functions would fail and set errno to [ENOEXEC], the execlp() and execvp() functions shall execute a command interpreter and the environment of the executed command shall be as if the process invoked the sh utility using execl() as follows:

execl(, arg0, file, arg1, ..., (char *)0);

where is an unspecified pathname for the sh utility, file is the process image file, and for execvp(), where arg0, arg1, and so on correspond to the values passed to execvp() in argv[0], argv[1], and so on.

Thing is, unless some app is hideously mis-designed, random saved files won't have execute permission on them, and won't execute. This is where tar files and ZIP files from Windows are so much fun, as they tend to have all-bits-on for some strange reason. (I know the Windows NT series has execute permission for files. I don't know if Windows users and developers are aware of that....)

(In other words, all [conforming] UNIXes do this.)

With the SERVER product, maybe. With the desktop product?

• Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3

• Commands and Utilities V4

• C Language V2

• Internationalized Terminal Interfaces

The best reason to know vi is that it is unsually installed on every UNIX box.

ed is always there too. It's part of the POSIX and SUS specs (along with vi).

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/idx/ index.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/xcu ix.html

The best reason to know vi is that it is unsually installed on every UNIX box.

ed is always there too. It's part of the POSIX and SUS specs (along with vi).

http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/000095399/idx/ index.html http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7990989775/xcu ix.html

It's clear you don't know what you are talking about. That statement is just plain wrong.

% uname -sr
Linux 2.6.16-1.2096_FC4smp
% man mmap
. . .
MAP_PRIVATE Create a private copy-on-write mapping. Stores to the region do not affect the original file. It is unspecified whether changes made to the file after the mmap call are visible in the mapped region.
. . .

Or you could look here... If MAP_PRIVATE is specified, modifications to the mapped data by the calling process shall be visible only to the calling process and shall not change the underlying object. It is unspecified whether modifications to the underlying object done after the MAP_PRIVATE mapping is established are visible through the MAP_PRIVATE mapping.

>> Microsoft has had a POSIX subsystem for ages. It's called Windows Services for UNIX, and it works quite nicely. It's not a new thing.

Just to drive the point home;

Where is fork() ?

Oh, and is fork() POSIX ? Yes, it is. CreateProcess doesn't really change that.

Well, yes and no... Various Linux distros have angled for POSIX certification and certification against the Single UNIX Specification, and so on, and I believe some have actually made it, though I don't see anything over at the Open Group's site.

Barring a huge merge between Linux and a "real UNIX," Linux will never be a "real UNIX" based on source code descendency. But, Linux may be considered a "real UNIX" at points due to SUS certification of particular distro releases that care enough to bother.

And, as far as BSD is concerned, while it may have removed certain proprietary AT&T code as part of the lawsuit, enough code and structure crossed both ways between BSD and AT&T that it'd be silly to argue that BSD is not "real UNIX." That said, it appears none of the BSDs have registered for UNIX certification.

Take a look at the unix03 register. Only Solaris 10 and AIX are Unix03 compliant. That's why it makes perfect sense for IBM to continue its commitement to AIX (and for Sun to Solaris of course).

Linux (I mean Linux in the broader sense, not just the kernel) should strive to achieve some sort of formal compatibility to a standard like that.

Well, the marketing shifted around so much, COM==ActiveX as far as most people are concerned.

The COM/DCOM Reference: Documentation for ActiveX Core Technology

You forgot Poland! ...er...GNUStep.
Sure it may not have all the apps, but, for developers, it's the closest thing to writing for a mac with out acutally writing for a mac.

http://www.gnustep.org

Also you forgot, CDE, XFCE, and Enlightenment.

It sounds like what you'd want for that is a message queue. You could write an implementation of messages queues based on shared memory + process-shared mutexes and conditions, but why reinvent the wheel? Linux comes with an implementation.

I notice the words Linux and Unix share many of the same letters. Guilty!
That's why I bought a lot of SCO stock at 100$ each !
Oups, it appears Unix is a trademark from the OpenGroup... http://opengroup.org/certification/unix-home.html
I'm selling... at 4$ :(

readlink - read the contents of a symbolic link

#include <unistd.h>

ssize_t readlink(const char *restrict path , char *restrict buf ,
size_t bufsize );

The readlink() function shall place the contents of the symbolic link referred to by path in the buffer buf which has size bufsize. If the number of bytes in the symbolic link is less than bufsize, the contents of the remainder of buf are unspecified. If the buf argument is not large enough to contain the link content, the first bufsize bytes shall be placed in buf.

If the value of bufsize is greater than {SSIZE_MAX}, the result is implementation-defined.

Upon successful completion, readlink() shall return the count of bytes placed in the buffer. Otherwise, it shall return a value of -1, leave the buffer unchanged, and set errno to indicate the error.

This list makes no mention of FreeBSD.

I'm speaking as/for a commercial developer which already has a working port on Linux of a very large and powerful app but can't release because of the license mess the linux GUI/OS is in.

Licence mess? Hmmm...

Have you looked at projects like FLTK, wxWindows, Tk from Tcl/Tk, TIX, the Adobe Source Libraries, or Mozilla's XUL and XPFE etc? It's definitely possible to develop closed-source GUI software on X11 with a range of widget sets without violating licences.

And really, if you're developing closed-source software and want the KDE look-and-feel, you can always purchase a Qt developer licence instead of opensourcing your code.

There is no one-true-widget-set which forces you to open-source your code. The closest thing to a "one-true-widget-set-for-X11", it would be Motif - and even that is free if you're developing for Linux - see OpenMotif...

Source: The Open Group's POSIX FAQ

Source: The Open Group's POSIX FAQ

That's all fine and dandy, but OSX isn't UNIX. It's XNU (XNU is Not UNIX) with BSD services. It's "UNIX-like" in the sense that Linux is "UNIX-like", but it's not "UNIX". Even Apple tells you it's "UNIX-like". Stop propogating the myth that OSX is UNIX. It's no more UNIX than Windows, or Linux, or Minux, or NEXT is. It's "UNIX-like". Get it right. I know you Mac guys will argue about it all day and night, sipping your Frappacinos while working on "artsy shit" on your elite "UNIX system". But XNU is Not UNIX. Do you see it here http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/? No. Because it's not UNIX.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_sys tem)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like

I think this page might be of interest to you.

The principle of LSB is that you can do it with LSB. TFA points out that you can't. Not only do LSB-Certified distro's (http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/display_product .tpl?CALLER=cert_prodlist.tpl&_pr_id=564 was the example cited by Drepper... it's SuSE for those too lazy to follow a link) not actually pass the certifications under real conditions, I have also seen LSB issues from a simple shell script (http://speedtouchconf.sf.net/). LSB specifies install_initd but doesn't specify its usage. Great... a standard way to install an init script. Totally useless without a standard usage for the script.

Since when was that the answer? If you actually read the comments, you'll see that comment #4 says, "This is a bug in these test cases.... They are also right about EINVAL being a 'may fail'." And if you actually read the linked problem reports, you'll note "Review Conclusion: A test suite deficiency is granted."

In other words, their answer is that they acknowledge that there's a bug in the standards test. I assume they're planning on fixing it. I see nothing that says their response was, "don't use fast SMP machines." That's something Ulrich claims, but he provides no documentation whatsoever.

Since when was that the answer? If you actually read the comments, you'll see that comment #4 says, "This is a bug in these test cases.... They are also right about EINVAL being a 'may fail'." And if you actually read the linked problem reports, you'll note "Review Conclusion: A test suite deficiency is granted."

In other words, their answer is that they acknowledge that there's a bug in the standards test. I assume they're planning on fixing it. I see nothing that says their response was, "don't use fast SMP machines." That's something Ulrich claims, but he provides no documentation whatsoever.

I will probably get modded flamebait, but I agree.

I just went throught the process of adding Bugzilla to my installation of Fedora Core 3. I run Fedora because that is the default Linux installed by my provider and anything else would more than double my costs. I just checked the LSB Certified Distribution List, and sure enough Fedora is not on it. I tried upgrading my system using Yum, but the versions installed with Yum were not current enough for my purposes. Every piece of source I had to download to get Bugzilla installed had to be configured with a switch pointing to a non-standard install directory.

This really surprised me, because the LSB has been around for a long time. I thought all major distributions had become compliant several releases ago. I especially expected Fedora, which many people consider the standard for Linux, to be compliant.

When there are no remaining links to a file, it is allowed to be deleted.

A file is deleted when the link count is 0 and no process has it open. You can delete (unlink) a file in UNIX and not affect any processes that are currently using it.

...Internet of today exists because of open standards...

-Don

The Open Group Releases COMsource 1.1

Menlo Park, CA. 10 January 2001 -- The Open Group has just released COMsource version 1.1, an enhanced version of the existing version, COMsource 1.0. COMsource is an open systems implementation of Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) middleware developed for the Windows TM platform that extends the COM middleware infrastructure to UNIX TM. COMsource also allows independent software vendors to easily port their COM applications to non-Microsoft platforms. COMsource 1.0, released in September 1999, provides an object-based, distributed programming model that allows two or more applications, or application components, to easily interact and interoperate. COMsource 1.1 has a number of added features and benefits, including:

Updated to run on Solaris 2.6
Added support for the latest versions of NT and Windows 2000. COMsource is now compatible with NT 4.0 Service Packs 4, 5 and 6 and Windows 2000
Maintenance updates for build and runtime issues; enhancements to error handling to enable passing of rich error information between servers and clients on various platforms

The reference implementations include source code, an interoperability test suite and the reference documentation set. COMsource 1.1 also now has a Support & Maintenance Service offering, which consists of:

Consultation on using, building, installing and porting COMsource
Problem isolation and tracking
Critical problem escalation
Development of code fixes or workarounds for defects

For more information on COMsource 1.1, please visit www.opengroup.org/comsource

The ActiveX Specification is freely available for anyone to implement. In case you didn't know, XPCOM is just an open source knock-off of ActiveX, with enough gratuitious changes to make them incompatible in practice. But essentially, they're the same thing.

XPCOM is no more secure than ActiveX. They both have total access to your computer. It's irresponsible of you to spread the misinformation that XPCOM is more secure than ActiveX, when it's not. It doesn't help anyone to have a false sense of security based on well meaning hype and uninformed cheerleading.

You're right that both ActiveX and XPCOM are more functional than AJAX (for some definition of the word "functional" -- in the sense that it has more client side functionality).

Perhaps Firefox should include support for ActiveX? There's nothing stopping them, really. So then it wouldn't have been necessary for to write a special XPCOM control, since they could have used their original ActiveX control.

Oh yeah, I forgot, it's more important for Firefox to make a rhetorical point by excluding ActiveX support, than to serve the needs of its users. That's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.

-Don