Mac OS X Leopard is Now Officially Unix

An anonymous reader writes "Mac OS X Leopard is now officially Unix, according to the Opengroup." I know everyone out there was really worried about this one. Welcome to the August news vacuum!

Comments

Doesn't make me want to buy an Apple any more

[jgarra23]

Seriously, buying an Apple computer is such an impulse buy anyway. I don't care if the one OS they can run is UNIX (though that's great for them, kudos). To buy an Apple means buying in to that Apple cult err, culture that I just don't want to be a part of... and I look at all the people coming out of the Apple store when I walk around town during lunch & those people REALLY DON'T CARE, that's for sure, they look like they're in a trance coming out of that store...

So what? It's not even a good PR move.

[Derleth]

And a resounding cry of "So what?" goes up from the huddled geek masses.

This is purely down to Apple having enough money to get the Open Group to administer the relevant tests. Everyone who understands this stuff knows NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even Linux are more Unix than Mac OS X will ever be in terms of both philosophy and technical details, but nobody connected to any of those projects has both the money and the incentive to get a specific version of those certified so they remain officially "Unix-like" in every context where you have to worry about Rabid Attack Lawyers.

Presumably, Apple has some reason for doing this. I don't pretend to understand what. It isn't the kind of thing that would appeal to their core demographic (iPod kids and Photoshop hacks) and they know Mac OS X doesn't have the technical chops to compete in real-world server farms where being SUS-compliant means being able to run lots of pre-existing software.

I'm probably wrong. Apple isn't known for being stupid. This just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.