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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?"
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?"
Companies and groups that are truly interested in standards will care and require it. Unfortunately all Linux distributions and BSD projects are not even close to being a Unix certified product. And the BSD families are much closer than Linux.
MacOSX could be with some cash (which they have lots of) but their target markets aren't hardcore techies, it's graphic designers and iPod buyers.
The real question is how much this certification matters, if it appears it doesn't co-exist with POSIX standards.
As discussed on comp.unix.solaris a few days ago - POSIX specifies (amongst many other things) what various flags passed to uname should produce. AIX (which my collegues and I always referred to as "Aix Ain't Unix" due to it's...ahem...'unique' approach to things) breaks this. So it shouldn't pass strict POSIX conformance testing, yet it passes UNIX03. So, what does this cert mean in reality, given that AIX is one of the most "non-Unixy" systems around anyway ? Who is really going to go for AIX over HP-UX or Solaris just because AIX got a cert ?
Complete and utter bullshit. One of the biggest IBM research centers is in the german speaking bit of Switherland. Even as far back as 1995 and the OS2 Warp release development work was done in places like Bulgaria, Russia, Chech republic. Another large development center which deals with non-right-to-left writing direction languages is Egypt. None of these are natively english speaking. In fact IBM has been closing research facilities in English speaking countries (England) in favour of non-english speaking countries for more then 10 years.
You have got the wroing impression because IBM is a company that it is extremely strict on requiring every employee to know and use English for internal correspondence and documentation. But it is not an US company at all. In fact Sun is considerably more US. To be more exact it is a combination of Californian Silicon Valley "we are better then everyone" with typical college dropout vindictiveness. DNS, paying SCO, kicking Red Hat under the table, so on so fourth. To summarize - Sun is typical international corporation - it is present around the world, with nearly all directors and administrative personnel of any noticeable influence being American. IBM is and has been trully global for a very long time. At least as far back as the age of typewriters (and the Nazi affair).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You Both Right and Wrong.
Right - BSD is a genuine descendant of the original AT&T Unix. It is a Unix in everything but name. Linux is a completely new clone
The wrong part is about what it takes to be a brand-name UNIX(TM). No descent from AT&T Unix is required and no code simularity is required. The only requirement is that the system meet certain inter-operability standards that are defined in the Unix Specification from Open Group. So a completely new clone like Linux could (theoretically) meet the standard, get certified, and call itself UNIX(TM).
I believe part of being a UNIX is having a large company to be held accountable for the software: no room for M$-style EULAs. Basically AFAIK if you get a UNIX you know you can sue the pants off of the company if it fux up. How the hell would any free or even low-cost *nix be able to meet that requirement? Frankly, the reason that people like Linx\BSD is because they are good and cheap... they are cheap because they have few costs... ergo free Unix is self-contradictory.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
So, if IBM is really embracing Linux, why spend the time and money to certify AIX. They could have spent it on Linux development. Doesn't the certification devalue Linux a bit by comparison?
I wonder why MS doesn't get its Server 2003 Unix-certified.
That's the funny thing about Unix. All it takes is a set of syscalls and libraries that would provide userland apps with all required interfaces. Unix is just some kind of virtual machine that userland programs can invoke and expect some kind of behaviour.
So, if Server 2003 implemented all those interfaces, it would effectively be Unix, and could be certified as such.
Now... does it?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
a la Multics. MS made a big deal out of C2 certification and politely forgot to point out that the only way they got it was to pull the network connection. Hey, this is the real world. B0 and seriously radiation hardened secure stuff *still* means our old friend Multics. (Which I personally liked even though our university ticked off everybody by busting the budget with their dual processor Honeywell c.a. 1980). If you really want a laugh imagine the comments from the science depts when the CS dept burns *everything* on such a nice box (no fortran compiler? eh?). The truth
was that even in those days the IT bimbos didn't grok the real (engineering) world...
Personally, I roll about the floor laughing every time MS tries to pretend it has a secure system.
If they ripped it down to the basics and made it open source we'd actually *fix* their problems for them. (OK, this isn't a joke). Someone poke Steve B with an umbrella (any Bulgarians at MS?)