Early 2025, I wrote about how I think macOS’ UNIX certification was basically a lie. It required so many convoluted and cumbersome changes to macOS that literally nobody applies to their system that it the certification had kind of become a farce. At the end of the article I wondered for how much longer Apple would be playing this little charade to hammer macOS through a meaningless UNIX-shaped hole, and it turns out the answer was “about 18 months”.
When you go to the Open Group’s website and the list of certified UNIX operating systems, macOS is no longer listed. For the past few weeks, it was still listed if you drilled down specifically to the UNIX 03 certification, but that, too, has now been removed. Assuming macOS 27 doesn’t return in the near future with a brand new certification, we can safely say that Apple got tired of paying a few employees to get its desktop operating system certified.
With one more operating system gone from the list, there’s now only one UNIX operating systems left: AIX. While the registry also lists HP-UX, z/OS, and UnixWare/OpenServer, those either only conform to really old UNIX certifications (from the ’90s), or simply aren’t developed anymore (HP sunset HP-UX at the end of last year). Only one operating system version conforms to the latest version of the certification, UNIX 07, and that’s AIX 7.2 TL5 “and later”, which possibly includes AIX 7.3, the most recent version of AIX.
Not that any of this really matters.
Ah, Thoms never-ending hate for all things Apple. Don’t let actual news reporting get in the way for the scheduled vitriol.
IIRC Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was certified as compliant in 2007 and was recertified until macOS 15 Sequoia (still getting security updates). Apparently it was originally to get out of some lawsuit (https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix-compliant-certified/answer/Terry-Lambert). You can hate them for getting caught up in the lawsuit in the first place. Sometimes marketing absolutely sucks and an engineer or two must fix their stupid stunts. Did it make Mac OS worse?
macOS Tahoe, apparently wasn’t certified. Apple has decided to go their own way. (Has it ever happened before?) It was released 13 months ago, so I am not sure this is considered to be “news”. Silly of me to think a site called “OSnews” was actually about that.
But more importantly, does it matter?
Oh, Thom answered that question himself: “Not that any of this really matters.”
Aha, so it was just venting… Must be a weekday ending in y.