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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,"
can Unix ever be *nix?
...
Seriously, for all practical purposes, GNU + Linux is setting the trend now. Ask IBM, Novell, SCO
Is there really a good reason why would GNU be considered as UNIX officially? GNU has it's own credibility. What is UNIX anyway? Does anyone have a concrete definition of what UNIX is right now (no historical reasons, not the fact that the filesystem starts with /).
Qui ne va pas à la chasse n'a pas de gibier
PHP Queb
GNU = GNU's Not UNIX...
:p
Have to change that to say GIU Is UNIX
Can GNU ever be unix?
I don't know. Maybe we should just ask SCO. They would probably have a reasonable opinion.
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If it's "close enough", surely big business are going to do more research than just look at whether it's been certified by The Open Group just so the Linux community can use its trademark?
The problem, as well, is what to certify. There are so many combinations of kernel, drivers, libc, userspace utilities and windowing systems that any certificate could well be rendered useless.
For example, if IBM paid for SuSE to get certified, would that apply to RHEL or Debian, if they were using slightly different kernel versions or different kernel patches as is often the case?
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
No, no, no. It's only GNU/Linux when those thieving Linux bastards don't give credit to the GNU folks, by calling the OS just 'Linux'.
RMS has no problem with you just calling it GNU.
--
Using GNU/Linux - Windows-free zone!
I suppose that if a certification were awarded, the acronym could be changed to "GNU's Now Unix." :-)
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?
But, the BSDs, and I believe even Solaris and AIX have a Linux compatability layer, or at the very least, "the GNU toolset", GCC, glibc, etc. Of course you wont beable to run IA32 binaries on a UltraSPARC, regardless of the compatability layer, but you could run IA32/Linux stuff on IA32/*BSD, or SparcLinux stuff on a Solaris box.
I guess Im trying to say, given that lots of things can run Linux binaries, can cleanly compile Linux targeted sources, Linux + GCC + glibc may be a better standard to target then POSIX and whatnot. It is definitly more modern. Or to put things another way, UNIX is irrelevent, the question shoud be: can UNIXes ever be Linux?
Linux deviates from Posix in several ways, and at least one of them is deliberate - because Linus is convinced that his way is better. Posix can't change because that would break all the existing and past unixes. IMHO Linus is unlikely to change because he believes in the advantages of his way.
(I don't recall what the particular difference was but as I recall Linus had a very good point. Security? Robustness? Anyhow it should be trivial to look it up - which I'd do if I had the time just now.)
And I don't see that it really matters, since they can continue as two operating systems and virtually anything will operate well on both, and some things break even crossing between Posix-compatible systems. Linux is doing quite well as is and may end up dominating. The rumors of the demise of the BSDs seem overblown. And who knows what will come next.
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UNIX® describes any operating system sold under a brand licensing agreement with the Open Group. This requires the product to pass a checklist that includes certification to the Single UNIX Specification (free reg. req.) on a given set of supported hardware, based in part on product testing, and payment of brand fees pursuant to the Trademark Licensing Agreement (PDF). Often these brand fees are high enough to shut out publishers of low-volume operating system products.
GNU/Linux seems to be evolving as its own standard
And this standard is called LSB.
Its just for 'brand recognition' anyway, and Linux has that now.
If you say 'Linux' to the general IT population, they already know what you are talking about. ( and they also realize the differences beteeen it and 'unix' ) so why muddy the waters?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Dude, read your f\w+ screen!
When GNU is Unix, LAME must be an MP3 encoder and WINE must be an emulator.
- Save a tree, eat more woodpeckers
What's the point? To be facetious, Unix is old and busted, linux is the new hotness. Instead of being focused on the past, look to the future. Being stamped "Unix" doesn't have the same meaning today as it did ten years ago. Bean counters today aren't asking about a Unix solution but a Linux one. Its the tech buzz word of the last 5 years. To the general public Linux has better name recognition than Unix. In fact, I commonly hear non-tech people referring to real Unix systems as "Linux".
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
No. GNU/Linux is not the same as GNU. The "official" kernel of the GNU system is Hurd. From the linked website:
"The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. The Hurd is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."
This clearly indicates that Hurd is the kernel specifically designed to be the centerpiece of the GNU system. Linux is just an acceptable placeholder until the Hurd is ready for spotlight. Therefore GNU/Linux is just a precursor for the True GNU System.
Seriously speaking, the Hurd does seem to have a number of very nice ideas - the translators (little programs that can be attached to directories and files, and which will then control all access to those files - so you can attach one to a directory and make the contents of an FTP site or whatever appear there - not unlike the proc filesystem on Linux), for example. I wonder if anything like them could be implemented in Linux ?
It also has some very serious problems, such as a lack of device drivers and every existing filesystem server memorymapping the entire partition, which means that you can't use partitions larger than 2 GB on a 32-bit system...
Oh well, it's good to know that the next generation free open source operating system is already being worked on - should keep Linux from getting fat and lazy ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
One of the reasons that GNU's Not Unix is because intentionally or not, a lot of the GNU tools differ from and are often outright incompatible with their counterparts from the original Unix and its descendents. There would be a lot rewriting and outright disposal of some of the primary features (or "incompatible extensions", as we would say if this were Microsoft) of the GNU utilities and libraries. These changes would also break compatibility in innumerable ways just among various pieces of GNU software. File formats would have to change. (gtar archives, Makefiles, etc)
The GNU project was a good idea with a good mission, but specifically calling it "GNU's Not Unix" really backfired on them in this aspect because Unix as we know it today is now more popular than it's ever been among both geeks and the corporate world.
If you ask google , it does not seem a good idea. SCO comes up first.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Free BSD as the name suggests IS free. Unix is not a valad trademark beacause beacause of its many forks and variations it has become a generic term. IMHO I think the people at SCO and Sony (with its joke of a digital music player) fell off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. Protecting your copyrights has become difficult these days. In a world of convergance, reverse engineering and "hey that was my idea" tactics A review of copyright laws and procedures needs to take place. If we come together and decide on open and fair standards that make things work. Things are going to change, biusness models that were viable before will no longer work. But its time to evolve.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Is what should GNU be. Not to be pedantic but if you have done real work with more than one GNU/Linux distribution you have run into compatibility issues. Its a fact of life and an impediment to the progress of GNU's penetration.
If standardization is a good thing (I think it is, but your opinion may vary) how should The GNU/Linux world go about it, and what parties should certify. Right now there are the DeFacto standards (Redhat/slackware/Suse/Mandrake) of the big distributions. The problem with these defacto standards is eventually the game collapses. There have been attempts to have multiparty standards (United linux comes to mind) but those for various reasons havent made a big push.
You can allready see the problems in setting a GNU/linux standard when there are vicious arguments over naming it Linux or GNU/Linux. Just who is going to be able to make decisions on filepaths, naming conventions, and library depencies and then shove it down the throats of the contrarians.
So before you ask can "GNU be Unix", you need to ask does GNU want to be standard, Who's standard, and does that standard want to be close enough to Unix to comply.
Meanwhile, commercial Unix vendors are going out of their way to achieve Linux compatibility, at either the source or binary level. Linux is quickly becoming the standard to which other Unices are compared. This means two things:
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This is redundant, but not knowing what its going to cost beforehand is the downfall of Open Group. $45,000 is one thing, half a million is another matter.
Linux has indeed been repackaged and registered. (To avoid flames from those that don't already know, I won't say which ones.) Linux as in say Gentoo and BSD in say FreeBSD are very successful now and it would be hard to justify the value in risking so much money for a seemingly worthless qualification.
I'm sure Suse (Novel) and Redhat will actually seek registration as commercial products. If X/Open would agree to fixed priced terms, they would do far more business. (Are you seeing this Open Group?) All things considered, this is like the MSCE scam and might have a negative impact.
The above mentioned BSD and Linux have treated me very well on a number of hardware platforms. Keep up the good work.
Hurd is definitely a good idea, but so far it is only that: an idea.
I have been hearing about Hurd at least since 1992 or so, ever since Linus started his project. This is 12 years now, and nothing concrete has come up yet, that can be adopted by the masses.
Don't get me wrong, I like many of the ideas and design decisions they have. But my gripe is that their model does not allow hordes of programmers to join in and get things out faster, like the Linux model.
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Sure he does. But he understands that he's working for the distro companies. If RedHat/Suse/IBM/etc thought it was a priority to get UNIX-Certified, Linus would merge their patches.
Note that Linus did a 180 on "Linux Threads" versus "POSIX Threads" because Linux vendors wanted portability.
Is the branding alive or not?
What Unix passes Unix 2003? OK. Who passed UNIX 98? Get the picture? Its going to cost ~$0.5M when all said and done. What advantage is there? Some of the 'UNIX' systems out there have not passed a checklist in over a decade.
Linux does not need people who dont code deciding what is right and wrong in expensive ongoing beurocratic processes. Things are decided much faster in open forums which document the process in ample detail.
Linux does deviate but given a coin toss, it goes with the previous 'standards.' If the legacy means does not make sense, its ignored and documented.
The UNIX branding made sense with legacy closed source Unix systems. It provided a level of trust that customers could drop to without even (imagine!) seeing the underlying code.
It was a bandaid on a broken model. The outdated Unix systems deviated but the customer could only read documentation, not code.
So systems like Solaris, AIX, HP-UX
If they decide to open up the process, they have to decide wether to join open source projects or try to replicate the efforts.
'UNIX' is dead. Do we need a netcraft survey?
I know people are going to say that wont work. "Look at all the forks in apache and perl and python. It will be anarchy."
Thats proven to not be the case. The problem has always been closed source.
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
My first reaction was: "Why the heck should Linux be Unix-certified? With increasing popularity, Unix will soon have to be Linux-certified if it wants to get any kind of market acceptance."
Well, as amusing as it may be, this thought is flawed. First of all Linux is merely the kernel; it's not even glibc, nor any other GNU tools, or third party packages. BSDs are Unix-like OS, just like Linux(-distros) are Unix-like. Solaris is also _a_ Unix-like OS, just like HP-UX.
Actually Unix has become a generic term which refers to all kind of kernels that expose a POSIX (don't remember the exact number) interface to userland applications. Any kernel (or microkernel + servers) that implements this interface, can be justly called Unix (or at least Unix-like; so as to not feed SCOundrel or Open Group lawyers).
The really interesting thing about the hype around Linux, is when we will move on and replace the Linux kernel with something totally different (be it microkernelized, or whatever). Then, we won't have just a GNU/Linux system anymore, but, say, also a GNU/Hurd/L4, GNU/Hurd/Mach or GNU/BSD, BSD/Linux, BSD/Hurd/*, ... system
(terminology being
"OS personality"/"OS servers"/"microkernel"
or "OS personality"/"monolithic kernel").
It seems silly to use the kernel name only as a brand for all kind of Unix-oid systems, regardless of them using the Linux kernel or something else; but providing the POSIX Unix interface.
To wrap it up: it's just a matter of names and brands. As other posters have commented before, Linux has gained enough popularity and visibility. It doesn't need to be certified to be successful!
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For the amiga's design purposes, it was pretty close to unix. It was intended to be a single-user system, so obviously, it didn't have all of unix's multi-user/network stuff. But it had true multitasking including it's own form of task prioritisation, pipes, similar commands, dynamic libraries, a powerful scriptable shell, etc.
Sure, it wasn't unix technically speaking. However, if you allow a certain 'artistic license' like we do for OS X, and add in a 'handicap' since this was a 16-bit 7Mhz machine usually with 1MB RAM or less, we can start to see just what AmigaOS was. IMHO, it was closer to a personal version of GUI-enabled Unix than OS X has managed yet. Technology has moved on, but I still miss the productivity I had on AmigaOS.
GNU (GNU's not Unix) has been certified Unix. In other news... Richard Stallman died today of a sudden heart attack.
I don't know if this is a new idea, but why not just use Linux as an acronym.
LINUX:
Linix Is Not UniX
Similar to PINE:
Pine Is Not Elm
Linux and GNU has its on street cred now. I really don't think the people still need to be sold on Linux and GNU being up to the job anymore. Most people wether they will admit it or not *know* Linux and GNU are now as good as the admin or engineer that runs the system, its the support network behind GNU and Linux they still worry about.
I think whats telling is how often and for how long we have seen Unices shipping with the GNU tools and compiler in the system. GNU is not Unix its something that in most or maybe all cases is inspired by Unix works like Unix but is better then Unix. Getting GNU certified as Unix would in that sense almost be a slap in the face to GNU, although it might still be an endorsement to the Linux kernel. Linux though as stated before does have enough of its own cred that Unix certification will have very little meaning.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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Of course, this is propably caused at least partially by Linux's success - Linux is drawing all the the good OS programmers.
The dev mailing list archives seemed depressingly empty when I checked :(.
Ironically, the Hurd should (at least in theory) be a lot easier to modify and develop. I wonder if I should give it a go... Maybe someone could port the Mach microkernel so it would work under Linux (or put a "Mach emulation layer" into the kernel) ? This would allow the Hurd to use the Linux device drivers, and allow people to try it without needing to repartition (you could use files as block devices via the loopback device). It would be just the kind of kick this project needs...
Of course, you could make an user-mode Mach emulator, but that would likely be pretty inefficient. Or would it ? Hmm...
Great, I already have all kinds of projects underway, from a roguelike for Java to a Usenet picture grapper with a web interface, and now this tought just had to pop in ;).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I think it only runs on Power Macintosh, and it's the only flavor of Linux that will work on NuBus (first generation) Power Macs.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Great, that's what we need! Now the Santa Caldera Operation Group with Darl McBribe and other greedy rednecks from Tarantella, Utah, will want our money! When GNU was NOT Unix the life was simple. Now, everything is going to change, in this up-side-down world when GNU's Now Unix... Frightening perspective
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Last year the Open Group sued Apple because Apple was advertising OSX as a "UNIX". This was reported on slashdot here. Apparently Apple had originally licenced the trademark, but had stopped paying fees and the licence lasped. Apple contended that "UNIX" is now a generic term and that they shouldn't have to pay to licence it. The Open Group, of course, felt compelled to defend their cash-cow trademark, so they lauched a lawsuit.
So, where is this now? I did a search but even the mighty power of Google can't seem to find any reference to the outcome or status of the case. Does anybody know what the status of this case is? Was it settled, or just languishing on the court's docket?
The difference between what the HURD has designed and the various efforts to implement them in Unix like operating systems is in user space. The HURD allows (or will allow, once its done) per-process overrides of any system call. LUFS simply allows a user space program to tell the kernel how to represent a device. With the HURD, there is no reason why another user will even see the results of your translators.
What I don't understand, is how the HURD is so late when it has these features. Creating or modifying a new system call should just involve installing a translator, testing it, and at worst logging out. No rebooting to test a new kernel feature.
I think a good point to remember is that the UNIX standard only lists minimum requirements for a UNIX. Linux could merely implement these requirements and still be able to innovate.
.NET and the upcoming Longhorn. If Linux is going to be relevant after Longhorn on a technical level, it needs to start to innovate. The UNIX standard is a good place to start.
Not only would this increase the capabilities of Linux but it could also serve as a way to bring UNIX applications into the Linux world with little effort. Once this is done, Linux can then efficiently replace UNIX itself.
What I believe the industry needs, is a "modern UNIX" that can compete with Windows from not only a user point of view but also a technical one. We are starting to come to the point where not only is UNIX but Linux is starting to become "left behind" by Windows through
Why would we want to have Linux be a certified Unix?
When Saturn came around, or Asian cars came to the US, did they try and advertise themselves as "Ford-compatible" or did they try and make a name for themselves?
This might have been a good idea a good 3, 4 years ago, but not now. 3, 4 years ago, Linux didn't have a market to speak of, and was not much more than an industry-wide toy. Now, it has major backing from IBM and Novell, and even people like my mom (technophobe nurse) is beginning to hear about Linux as the next-best thing. Linux currently offers, for the most part, much more than the Unix offerings. That couldn't have be said 5 years ago.
The last thing the Linux community needs now is to have Linux associated with an old, outdated 'standard' that is Unix.
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