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Can GNU Ever Be Unix?
An anonymous reader writes "The question isn't whether Linux can be certified as Unix. At least some distributions no doubt can. But who would pay for it? And is it worth the trouble? Jem Matzan asks these questions on NewsForge, and reminds us that the Open Group, not SCO, owns the Unix trademark,"
This is particularly evident when you notice that the major improvements in some recent version of Solaris (8 & 9, but not 10 apparently) is to add more open source software and stability improvements.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I think it is almost certain that some distro of Linux could easily pass OG's test suite. It is also almost a certainty that FSF/GNU would never opt for it on religious grounds.
The rest of the thread is now available for stupid /. jokes.
In Soviet Russia, The Open Group petitions GNU for certification.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
GNU/Linux seems to be evolving as its own standard
And this standard is called LSB.
I have been saying that for several years now. UNIX is all but dead. The only commercial UNIX likely to still be arround in ten years time as an ongoing product is OS/X. Solaris will have long since joined IRIX, Digital UNIX and VMS as O/S you can still buy and occasionaly see a minor upgrade for it.
There is a basic set of core functions that O/S do and this has not changed in principle for over a decade. Log based file systems, threads that work etc are now standard, but none of this was new ten years ago.
The interesting stuff all takes place either above or below the O/S layer. .NET, J2EE etc are where interesting stuff is happening.
At the driver level I think that both Unix and Windows have the model hopelessly wrong. We have at last got past the point where we have to recompile the kernel for each new driver. But drivers are still mostly executable code while the differences between devices of the same genre are with very few exceptions the type of thing that can be described by code tables.
I would like to see device manufaturers get out of the device driver writing business, have a genuinely generic driver in the O/S and discover the repetoire of a particular device by reading a configuration file - preferably one that can be read from the device. From a pragmatic point of view XML would probably be a good match for the task since you would inevitably need structured data and a way to extend the basic data structures.
Unix once had this with the printcap and termcap files. Unfortunately people just seem to be unable to resist turing complete code.
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well, it mattered to me.
Back in the days, around 1995, my friends and I were looking for any UNIX to put on our machines to learn. We tried an old copy of SCO Unix which didnt work, and were busy snooping till we found Linux just as it was getting popular online. We got into Linux because we were out looking for UNIX.
Nowadays I've got AIX and Solaris on ultrasparc to play with, so I can finally brag about knowing 'unix', but would be real nice if Linux is called UNIX. Even though SCO has spilled cold water on the brand name, it still carries enough weight, and maturity of two decades, to get attention. Linux is still new to the scene, and UNIX has carried the full weight of the Internet since its birth... that means something.
Linux means alot more now, so can UNIX be Linux, or at least its former self? Thats possible, if Linux is branded UNIX, and UNIX can once again claim to be a popular flexible modern OS. Cant do that with SCO Unixware.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky