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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?"
IBM is rivaling Microsoft's uncany knack for aligning their company with revelant dates.
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
IBM had to turn down the certification because they couldn't find the relevant code.
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.
Not exactly a selling point for either, eh?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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 ?
you know its a slow news day when the article starts with "Last Wednesday..." -jordan
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.
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/
The curious thing about the argument regarding IBM is that it avoided the fact that many Americans are not fluent in English, and that IBM apparently must hire only the subset of Americans who are fluent in English. If they don't, and, in reality, they actually hire Americans with a broad spectrum of English proficiency, then the argument defending IBM is moot.
I've worked with Americans my whole life (being an in the USA and all), and, truly, many, if not a majority, of Americans act as if they had just learned their ABCs. It is quite depressing having to read problem reports or e-mails that look like they were written by second graders.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
If you go back to old articles about SunOS when it was first upgraded to 64 bits (becoming Solaris), you will find plenty of articles describing the flaws and the lack of stability in the product.
Are you on crack?
Solaris 1.x was SunOS 4 (BSD derived)+ OpenWindows; Solaris 2.x was SunOS 5 (SysV derived) + OpenWindows. Both were 32 bit operating systems running on 32 bit hardware (ignoring things like large file support), until UltraSPARC hardware came along and Solaris 7/2.7 added support for 64 bit operation in 1998 (this is 7 years after Solaris 1.0 shipped, and 6 years after Solaris 2.0 shipped).
Your post is factually inaccurate, bigoted, etc.
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.
This is a "which of your children do you love most" question. AIX serves a different purpose and market than Linux. For example you can now run AIX on a 64 way SMP machine and get good scaling, Linux tops out at what? is it 8 now or still 4? There are a raft of applications that run on AIX that do not (yet at least) run on Linux and there are other issues.