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IBM First To Receive UNIX 2003 Certification

Posted by timothy on from the gave-a-party-and-nobody-came dept.

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?"

6 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Standards... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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.

    1. Re:Standards... by MBCook · · Score: 5, Interesting
      I agree. While Apple is trying to get their machines in the server room (especially for small businesses) and they are nice machines, they are definatly not aimed at the kind of places that would probably demand this certification. I would think this kind of thing would be more apt to be a requirement for large contracts at large companies (Fortune 500 and such), where if they wanted to they would have the resources to work around the bits that are missing from OS X (whatever those are, no idea) if they really cared.

      I don't think Apple would get any real benefit (at least in the short term) from such a certification. They should get into more server rooms first.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    2. Re:Standards... by TiMac · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Mac OS X COULD be, except for legal issues. The Open Group sued Apple years ago (link) over Apple's use of UNIX in regards to Mac OS X, and the lawsuit was delayed last year until this year....I don't remember hearing anything more about it since....and I can't find any new info. Apple is fighting the very idea that Open Group has a trademark on UNIX anymore, claiming the term generic. Might weaken their case if they paid to license it now.

      --

  2. What is the point ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ?

  3. Re:Better Working Conditions - More Stable Softwar by arivanov · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

    --
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  4. Re:MS Windows by cpghost · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.