Submitted by OS X’s commercial credentials recently got a major boost from the Open Group. Thanks to the efforts of Apple’s OS boss Kevin Van Vechten and his team, Leopard has cleared all of the hurdles required to attain UNIX 03 certification. Only Sun, IBM & HP are certified so OS X turns the Big Three to Big Four.
I wonder why the certification was issued only for the Intel version of Leopard. Aren’t they generally the same (at least, standards-wise)?
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
I don’t know but perhaps you have to pay for each architecture and as the futur of Mac OS X is Intel, they do not want to pay twice.
Edited 2007-08-01 07:18
Or Apple wants people to buy new shiny Intel Macs and not encourage them to keep their old PPC Macs.
I don’t think that many in the general Mac-buying crowd are concerned about UNIX certification.
That’s right. Even-tough Linux were Unix certified, it doesn’t change anything.
although i think this push is more for their server section of the business, perhaps Apple will try a stronger push in that direction?
>Or Apple wants people to buy new shiny Intel Macs >and not encourage them to keep their old PPC Macs.
I don’t think that many in the general Mac-buying crowd are concerned about UNIX certification.
Actually, I would assume that’s the point. Frankly, I doubt most of the Mac-buying crowd actually know what Unix is (besides the funky OS with no GUI that was featured in Jurassic Park). However, Apple does have a server product line and being Unix certified is probably giving them a hand.
As Hakime pointed out, there are a lot of companies that do care about Unix certification. I agree — there could be a good gain in userbase should software like the one he described be ported — but I also doubt that is going to happen too soon, mainly due to skepticism and an already too small userbase (i.e. how many engineers actually use Macs?) The field is already there though — OS X does ship with a decent X11 implementation so the porting effort is, eventually, minimal — but why bother?
From a personal point of view, I really don’t know who the hell would want OS X Server instead of already established and well-backed operating systems like Solaris or AIX, but it’s a free market after all. It’s probably somewhat of my own, I just haven’t heard of OS X server doing anything wonderful compared to the others besides having that cool Aqua interface. Then again, there is a big possibility I am misinformed (I really don’t know all *that* much about OS X server)
> I don’t know but perhaps you have to pay for each architecture and as the futur of Mac OS X is Intel, they do not want to pay twice.
peanuts – take a look at the rather low fees: http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/Brandfees.htm
only $ 110.000 per year (if apple manages to sell more than 30.000 servers). but as they pay according to units sold, and don’t sell any ppc-servers anymore, they probably can’t license ppc-osx. of course, as all units of osx-server are universal, they could also pay the fee twice. but i imagine steve would feel ripped of.
And yet, there’ll still be people who deny it. Slashdot are not even reporting it…
Maybe Slashdot doen’t report this, because it’s old news. Apple got that certificate in May.
> http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3555.htm
People stopped caring about what is UNIX and what isn’t UNIX over ten years ago.
DoD and the Fed Markets haven’t stopped caring.
They care about the security certifications, yes.
There are still a number of market sectors where UNIX is still VERY important
Not least from the perspective of ‘easily’ migrating old (and doubtless costly) UNIX apps
Also its worth reitterating
‘Only Sun, IBM & HP are certified so OS X turns the Big Three to Big Four’
Apple is now looking to compete DIRECLY with the UNI big boys…
I don’t think so, UNIX certification is maybe out of order, but real UNIX heritage or “the spirit of UNIX” is more than hacking a kernel together and call it Linux. It’s KISS, it’s quality, it’s real software engineering. It’s not hype or “just do it” – this I call “Windows”.
> http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/01/123258
There are now.
Wow, it took Slashdot a few more houres more to report a 3 months old story. Yeah, that’s really proof that people deny Leopard’s UNIX certification….
“People stopped caring about what is UNIX and what isn’t UNIX over ten years ago.”
“I don’t think that many in the general Mac-buying crowd are concerned about UNIX certification.”
Not sure! A lot of companies which develop very specialized software that support Unix systems like AIX, or Solaris or Hp/UX will be happy to know that they can juste recompile their very expensive products in order that they run on mac.
If that happens, well, users of those products (me included) will be happy to know that they do have the choice to buy a mac to run their production softwares on an mac Unix box that is much cheaper than the usual Unix boxes and and that run a more appealing and modern OS, and again which is still a Unix.
What are those applications, you ask? Well i think about CAD applications, applications for finite-element analysis, computational fluid analysis, structure analysis, multiphysics analysis. The mac still lacks the finite-element packages from the big names, Fluent, Ansys, Flow-3D, Cosmos, MSc, etc….
I do think that this certification will bring those editors to consider the mac as an viable alternative. Porting their applications will be straightforward for them from their code base running on Unix, and i am looking forward for that day it they will to do so.
Porting their applications will be straightforward for them from their code base running on Unix, and i am looking forward for that day it they will to do so.
Wouldn’t it have been straight forward for them to do it 5 years ago or whenever OSX came out?
Did anything change recently for it to become certified?
Intel XServes :3
Using Mach, NetBSD and FreeBSD as base, plus some money et voila UNIX03. What a nonsense :o)
> Using Mach, NetBSD and FreeBSD as base, plus some money et voila UNIX03. What a nonsense :o)
it doesn’t seem to be that easy. apple certainly had the money to pay for a license before, and they were advertising osx as “unix-based”, so they must have been interested in a formal unix certification. there must have been some technical issues as well which couldn’t be handled without some major changes to osx. and if you look at the list of apis, many have no equivalent in bsd.
>many have no equivalent in bsd.
And they aren’t relevant most of the time for UNIX(R) at all.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/index.html
Read yourself. It’s just PR.
>>many have no equivalent in bsd.
>And they aren’t relevant most of the time for UNIX(R) at all.
i think you misunderstood me. i didn’t mean the special apis of osx (carbon, cocoa etc.) but the 1742 apis listed in the unix 03 specification: http://www.unix.org/version3/apis.html
Wrong.
Money alone will not get you certification.
There is a substantial test suite as well set of requirements to achieve UNIX certification.
>http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/index.html
Yes? Compare it!. UNIX is of course nowadays a trademark. But to be a real UNIX you have to go back in history and look at it, UNIX _and_ BSD were the base for *every* further development.
Get it, MacOS is no UNIX in terms of the initial operating system or “the spirit within this kind of operating system”, it’s a bunch of technologies more or less effective assembled. And I don’t speak of trademarks or certifications which are out of order.
MacOS X is couture, nothing more.
This is not a personal attack but I need to ask what some people are smoking/drinking? Better yet, what reality do they live in?
Many organizations use Unix-based systems, read servers and workstations, in their production environments.
As for the individual who made the snide comment regarding the purchase of an OS X server, I won’t be like some of the fascist thought police who roam the halls of OS News and mod your comment down. This equipment will run OS X, Linux and even if you must a Redmond flavored server. We have two and both are solid.
Edited 2007-08-01 12:24
As for the individual who made the snide comment regarding the purchase of an OS X server, I won’t be like some of the fascist thought police who roam the halls of OS News and mod your comment down. This equipment will run OS X, Linux and even if you must a Redmond flavored server. We have two and both are solid.
I wasn’t questioning the robustness of the hardware. I was merely suggesting that OS X Server (i.e. the server edition of OS X: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/ ) is not a very popular choice, and that I don’t see how a Unix certification could change this significantly. There are already well-established alternatives coming from companies with a tradition in server equipment and operating systems — and, despite being an Apple user myself (since the days of System 6 actually), I fail to see why someone would choose Apple’s solutions over Sun’s, for instance. Not that I don’t like seeing AUX again, in another form maybe :-P.
I hope Leopard comes with some optimisation around the performance of some apps then , notably MySQL.
Unless of course Oracle have their DB running just fine – in which case it backs up the other argument that its the way MySQL is coded.
IIRC Postgresql doesn’t suffer the same performance issues?
Not sure what this buys for Apple, unless they are really gunning for Sun or IBM’s market – although I suspect they are playing the we’re Unix-certified and alternative to Microsoft card that the Linux peeps like to claim.
Whats the value of this certification?
Expensive bragging rights for Apple?
Since they have the certification, it means that anything developed to the standard will work on any machine with the certification.
You will be able to take your MacBook Pro with you and develop without needing to use the customer’s machine and get used to another environment.
Apple aren’t testing the PowerPC machines because they’re not selling any now.
After working on one UNIX system and going to another and finding that they’re just a little bit different so that things need to be tweaked, certification is a bit deal. Linux users should understand this because the distributions wouldn’t be necessary if everything worked exactly the same.
I have a friends he works in IT at a denfese contractor nearby and he told me they only use Unix there. I asked him about Linux and he said in his field, it has to be a certified Unix so all their system runs exactly same whatever Unix they use. And by Unix he means systems like Solaris that passed the Open Group’s tests. Don’t disregard this; this will open some new doors to places where not even MS can go.
If you want a cool terminal for tour new mac UNIX take a look at this guy’s article on using an old Apple II as a dumb terminal : http://pdw.zoomshare.com/0.shtml/63b2407517a7e8a33040b01a398bc79f_4…
Ah, imagine a server room full of mac mini’s with Apple II’s connected to them as terminals. Wouldn’t that be much quieter and peacefull than all those Sun Fire 25k’s, and more aesthetically pleasing to boot 😉
. . . what are IBM, Sun, and HP’s offerings on certified UNIX Laptops compared to Apples?
Solaris x86
http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/x86-laptops.html
HP-UX
http://www.cypress-tech.com/hpuxlaptop.htm (128MB cache? Wow Impressive)
IBM AIX
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/elkins_cygwin.ht…
Apple OS X
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/wa/…
Anyone needing an actual UNIX Laptop, I think the “choice” is clear.
Hey, that hpux laptop had a typo. It should read 128kb not mb. I fixed it.
Note: the hpux laptop was built in the mid 90’s so don’t expect it to compete with anything today. It was aimed at a portable troubleshooting solution not as a workhorse.
Ask anyone who administrates OS X Server professionally. Even in a solid all-OS X environment, stuff does not exactly behave like you would expect from another *nix background — and integration between OS X Server and other OSes can be quite maddening since some of their provided userland is non-standard, such as named and their CIFS client (!!). The GUI management tools they’ve provided did not really help this situation much at all.
There have been times where I really have wished this really was just ‘FreeBSD with a nice desktop’ and I know I’ve not been alone in bitching. It’s close enough for horseshoes, but not for enterprise.
Despite just saying something that might be considered inflammatory and not providing a whole lot of details, I might as well throw this out there — The depreciation of NetInfo and commitments to trying to play nice with others and standardizing is welcome in Leopard, even if some of it may be perceived as a shallow token by others.