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IBM First To Receive UNIX 2003 Certification
Hobart writes "Last Wednesday, IBM's AIX was the first to receive the UNIX 2003 certification from The Open Group, beating out Sun, HP, SCO and the rest. No mention anywhere in the branded products register of any Linux/BSD distribution, or Mac OS X. Are any companies still developing software to this certification, or requiring it?"
I thought it was always strictly a UNIX® thang that was never important to the noncommercial BSDs, Linux, or OS X. That doesn't mean it isn't important to the markets that still rely on it for interoperability.
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IIRC, the orginal idea behind the UNIX trademark being given to the Open Group was so they would "protect" the UNIX name by making sure that anything calling itself "UNIX" would have to meet certain inter-operability standards. You could only license the UNIX(TM) name if your product met some strict standards.
That *would* have been a GOOD THING(TM). The problem is they charge mega-$$$ for certification and license royalties. They charge much much more than their costs and reap a huge profit on each certification. This basically freezes out any free/open unix-like system and it also is a barrier to entry for a start-up who would otherwise meet the standard. With a little work, there are few reasons why FreeBSD (for instance) would not be able to meet the standard, but that would require mega-bucks to be handed over to the Open Group and few open source project have that kind of money.
Cheers to IBM for meeting the standard. Jeers to Open Group for being a bunch of greedy bastards and locking out Free Software.
Did you realize that those failures you described are first of all management failures rushing far from mature product to the market ? And the management is rarely consisting of H-1B visa holders, just the opposite - they are all Americans.
I am from the former Eastern Bloc and I was working for an outsourcing company for a while (for a German partner). The amounts of craptacular code written by supposedly superior Western programmers (and American too - one of the largest US jeans makers is using our software to design and cut jeans) were something incredible. So stop this elitist and xenophobic bullshit, please.
If you are unable to compete, either on salary or more like on quality terms, well, tough for you. Either adapt or die. It is the same for us, because the Indians and Chinese have even lower salaries than former Easterners. However, we are not whining and crying in a corner that those H-1Bs took our jobs, we are trying to outcompete them on things they cannot do. Try to do the same instead of this crap, OK ? Capitalism works both ways, you know.
Regards, jan
Linux should follow Unix standards, and this is rather important since the Unix standards tend to be designed to assure source compatability, that the base libraries, kernel, and environment follow the same standards so that software and application libraries can compile on any Unix-compliant OS with no modification. This is essential to having true OS choice because if you want to switch OSs its nice to be able to take your applications with you. Furthermore, since it allows the same software to be compiled on different OSs, all Unix OSs can co-exist and benefit from the software written for each other, so each OS doesnt have to have a set of applications rewritten for it, which wastes time. Linux shouldnt have the "take over the world" mentality and realise that people do deserve OS choice and thus support standards to allow people to move freely between Linux and other Unix OSs.
Half right. It has nothing to do with the nationality, national origin, or immigration status of employees. It has a lot to do with what is expected of employees, and what processes are involved in writing software.
I worked for some years for one of IBM's competitors. I wasn't a tech writer there, but looked into it before joining. The software development process involved working closely with the writers. The programmer's job, in essence, was to make it work according to the documentation, not the other way around. The relaese cycle was slow, but it was industrial strength code. Something I miss today.
Oddly, it seems to me that most of the tech writers working around here nowadays -- in English -- are not native speakers. Most are Russian. They take care with the language that a native usually misses. But they're not programmers. It's a rare programmer who can write decent text.