The IEEE and The Open Group have granted permission to the FreeBSD Project to incorporate material from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6.This step will allow developers of the FreeBSD Platform to gain a better understanding of how to write portable programs utilizing IEEE 1003.1, “Standard for Information Technology: Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX)”.
The POSIX standard, which also forms the core volumes of Version 3 of The Open Group’s Single UNIX Specification, defines a set of fundamental services needed for the construction of portable application programs. IEEE and The Open Group have granted permissions for reuse of material covering over 1400 interfaces from the standard including the headers, system interfaces and utilities.
i’m guessing from the lack of comments that no one else understands the importance of this either… anyone care to explain?
i thought POSIX was an open specification that anyone could implement… why was FreeBSD “granted permission”?
Agreed, How is this important.
Does linux have this permission already?
It was always free to implement the standard.
It was not free to copy from the standards material to drop it into man pages and documentation (thus, saving a lot of time and effort) – a license was required, and large vendors paid for this. This has now been relaxed, so that anyone can copy from the documentation, such as open source folk.
Before anyone complains, The Open Group has to fund its efforts somehow (e.g. they employ people, organise standards activities, websites, etc) – their (fairly good, in fact) and this approach was how they made money from commercial vendors (who, arguably, could afford it), yet allow independents and others to still access and use the material.
This is old news anyway, it occurred last year, as part of the recent update to the POSIX specification (I participated in the effort). Arguably, POSIX has some competition from LSB, and this relaxation may be to do with it.
The POSIX v LSB debate is another whole issue: the LSB material covers 80% of what POSIX already does, however the LSB folk claim that it’s sufficiently different that LSB should be pursued in its own right. The POSIX folk say “lets both bend a bit to meet and produce one common standard (POSIX)”. POSIX is already the result of multiple vendors bending and coming to agreement, so incorporating LSB is just another. Unfortunately, LSB folk don’t see it this way and are pursuing their own ISO standards. This is just a big waste of space. It would be to the benefit of us all if there were only one POSIX style standard, not two. It’s fairly clear the POSIX folk are being concilliatory here, but the LSB folk stuck in the mud. Very unfortunate.
In case anyone doesn’t know what LSB is, it refers to Linux Standard Base (www.linuxbase.org)
“It’s fairly clear the POSIX folk are being concilliatory here, but the LSB folk stuck in the mud. Very unfortunate.”
Hmm… the snide commentator in me notes how similar that behavior looks to what the Linux people accuse Microsoft of: forging a new standard that is almost like the existing one, but sufficiently different that it forces people to decide whether they are “in” or “out” of a certain camp. Yes… I know I’m asking to get flamed here, but I truly have to ask why we need a separate ISO standard for Linux, when Linux was originally based on the POSIX standard.
With many open source applications increasingly being written for Linux alone (sorry, *BSD or other Unix users), this behavior seems like another way to divide the world rather than bring it together.
So if linux will not be POSIX standard, it will not be call UNIX anymore
“this behavior seems like another way to divide the world rather than bring it together.”
This is exactly why POSIX started in the first place. In the early 1990’s (I ported a _lot_ of unix software) it was BSD v SVR4 as the two major flavours – now it seems it’ll be LSB v POSIX if we don’t watch out. Please if anyone is reading this and is in a position of influence, bring the world together, don’t divide it. It may require a bit more pain and effort now, but it’ll pay off in 10 years time.
Is OS X based on Free BSD? Does OS X incorporate material from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6?
“So if linux will not be POSIX standard, it will not be call UNIX anymore
”
Linux has never been a Unix, nor called one. It is a Unix-like OS, although some people do not fully understand the difference.
POSIX believe it or not is not related to Unix in any way, it is a portability standard. It so happens that NT is POSIX compliant, that doesn’t make it Unix.
For something to be called “Unix” it has to fulfill a superset of requirements (POSIX compliance is only part of the superset).
I think there are also different levels of POSIX compliance. NT is not fully POSIX compliant. I’m pretty sure if you were fully POSIX compliant you’d look pretty much like a Unix.
NT 3.51? to W2K3 are POSIX compliant; however, they are version 1.0 compliant (the current 1003.1 is something like version 3.?). Longhorn & 64bit versions of Windows will not be.
Mac OS X is mostlikely somewhat POSIX comliant. The program interfaces are correct; however, they use Mach-O instead of ELF and they’ve moved/renamed a few directories. These changes will keep it from being truely POSIX compliant.
If you compile a program to the POSIX standard 1.0, then you should be able to run the binary (no recompiling required) on W2K or Linux.
Basicaly any program compiled for POSIX should run on any machine with the same processor and an OS that is the same version of POSIX compliant. (at lest that’s the theory)
Just what we need. A modern day “UNIX” standards war.
It’s not like either group is going to back down any time soon, and by the time they do, the standards may become so divergent that any attempt to reintegrate them will result in a set of APIs that make Win32 look spartan by comparison.
Okay, probably not quite that bad, but if these “UNIX” standards wars repeat themselves once every decade or so, perhaps it’s not that bad of a statement for me to have made.
And people wonder where bloat comes from
“It’s not like either group is going to back down any time soon”
Be careful: the POSIX group is actively trying to meet in the middle – they have no position to back down from, it’s the Linux LSB guys that are being intransigent.
Gotcha.
The LSB written specification can be freely copied, distributed and modified under the GNU Free Documentation license. Were it merged into the POSIX specification, all those freedoms would be retracted, leading to a recurrence of the problems wrt poor documentation that arose due to the Open Group’s more restrictive licensing arrangements (http://www.opengroup.org/austin/mailarchives/austin-group-l/msg0637…).
If much of the LSB spec deals with what’s already covered by POSIX, it’s because the Linux distros need a from-scratch rewording of the material in order to actually be able to include any of the information therein in their manpages and other documentation.
linux was created to be an open source CLONE of unix. It has kind gone into a diff diretection. Technically, the only UNIX OS’s are:
AIX, Solaris, Tru64, UnixWare, Reliant Unix, HP-UX, OS/390, NCR Unix, UX/4800, IRIX, OpenServer.
so apparently, all the BSDs, unicos, etc. can’t be called unix OS’s..
Linux could be called a flavor or UNIX by the open group if they just made a few changes and applied for it.
Linux implements a UNIX system from scratch well enough to be caleld a unix for me.. I view the linux isn’t unix as a great marketing approach.
i could be wrong but i believe due to the licensing of the BSD code and some court stuff, (MAYBE the AT&T stuff)
that they can be called UNIX, but not UNIX(TRADEMARK Symbol)
this netbsd page explains part of it.
http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/call-it-a-duck.html
okay, i double checked that page, netbsd is also “unix like”
but i still could have sworn that freebsd due to its branch of whatever version of BSD from Berkely/AT&T was allowed to be called Unix.
again it may simply be a trademark issue as to whether or not its UNIX but it is a “UNIX” (not unix-like)
its more a matter of terminolgy and the issue of trademarks in my opin. like that url states, if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, …..
but i dont know what is all required in a “UNIX certification” other than cutting a check. which obvisouly an OSS project is not likely to afford.
anyone have any knowledge of what makes a Operating system UNIX, is there specifications etc?
and if any of the BSDs are actually UNIX?
You are misguided. There is nothing that prevents the LSB folk from working with POSIX to see a single unified standard, yet maintaining their own less-restrictive version of documentation and manpages / etc as an _implementation_ of the standard.
You mention ” … If much of the LSB spec …” – this is the whole problem: for the sake of industry there should be one spec: POSIX.
“that they can be called UNIX, but not UNIX(TRADEMARK Symbol)”
The term “UNIX” *is* the trademark. They can’t use it without the Open Group’s say so, regardless of whether or not they suffix the trademark symbol.
“but i dont know what is all required in a “UNIX certification” other than cutting a check. which obvisouly an OSS project is not likely to afford.”
http://www.opengroup.org/certification/idx/unix.html
“and if any of the BSDs are actually UNIX?”
I believe that BSD/OS was, until Wind River discontinued it last September (http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/2003/09/News105.html)
“for the sake of industry there should be one spec: POSIX.”
Uhh… The Open Group doesn’t seem to feel nearly as strongly about it as you do. In fact, the LSB is one of the standards listed on their http://www.opengroup.org/certification/ page.
Anyway, another thing that sets the two standards apart is their pricing structures. Compare http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/Brandfees.htm with http://www.opengroup.org/lsb/cert/docs/LSB_Fee_Schedule.html and you’ll see what I mean. The LSB is intended to foster compatibility between Linux distros – how could it possibly achieve that goal if none of them were able/willing to pay for certification?
I linked to the pricing for the UNIX certification, not POSIX. Silly me :-P.
The POSIX certification pricing can be found here (http://posixcertified.ieee.org/posix-fee-schedule-1.0.pdf). They don’t appear to provide an HTML version.
The discussion of Linux is interesting and instructive, but back to the topic at hand: FreeBSD. I see this as a great piece of news for FreeBSD and FreeBSD users. IMHO, FreeBSD has always been more focused on meeting standards, and doing so robustly. The POSIX inclusion provides just another good rationale for adoption of FreeBSD in the industry.
“IMHO, FreeBSD has always been more focused on meeting standards, and doing so robustly. The POSIX inclusion provides just another good rationale for adoption of FreeBSD in the industry.”
nope. it just allows freebsd to use documentation from posix.
regarding the lsb -lsb was created due to license restrictions from the posix group who need royalty which none of the linux distros are able to pay
Unicos/MP is based off IRIX 6.5 so is in everyway as much a UNIX as it’s parent. The reason why it’s based off IRIX is that Cray were owned by SGI at the time they developed it and the X1.
Oldstyle Unicos was based off both BSD and SystemV
“nope. it just allows freebsd to use documentation from posix.”
Please… I am well aware of exactly what was granted. I happened to actually read the discussion here. I’m not saying this automatically results in any sort of major change in FreeBSD (as if one is needed). But, inclusion of the POSIX docs just puts a little more “weight” into FreeBSD’s committment to standards and interoperability, since FreeBSD and FreeBSD ports developers will have instant access to this documentation. Also, it provides commercial Unix software vendors with a good resource for porting applications, and it in general promotes positive practices in computing.
And, regarding standards, FreeBSD does indeed follow Unix standards a lot more closely than the average Linux distribution (Slackware being somewhat of an exception). For a quick example, just to “man hier” from the command line, and see how closely most Linux distributions follow it (egad… RedHat…), compared to FreeBSD.
“regarding the lsb -lsb was created due to license restrictions from the posix group who need royalty which none of the linux distros are able to pay”
Well… since The Open Group granted FreeBSD free access to these documents, why wouldn’t they also grant this to Linux? Let’s find this out, before we argue any more about Linux in a FreeBSD discussion.
“And, regarding standards, FreeBSD does indeed follow Unix standards a lot more closely than the average Linux distribution (Slackware being somewhat of an exception). For a quick example, just to “man hier” from the command line, and see how closely most Linux distributions follow it (egad… RedHat…), compared to FreeBSD.”
my redhat system isnt very different. in fact the only change i could find is the the use of /usr/share/doc which is documented inside the man page itself. btw posix is not a concrete rule its a base specification. every unix like operating system differs from posix one way or another
“regarding the lsb -lsb was created due to license restrictions from the posix group who need royalty which none of the linux distros are able to pay”
Well… since The Open Group granted FreeBSD free access to these documents, why wouldn’t they also grant this to Linux? Let’s find this out, before we argue any more about Linux in a FreeBSD discussion.”
you dont understand. they need royalty for several standard specifications and adherance. its not something linux related. its specifically that posix is controlled by a entity which demands money from people who want to use the unix trademarks and being posix certified. of course they wont lose big money on copying docs into freebsd. ask them to certify that freebsd is posix compatible or permission to use the unix trademark. you will know what i am talking about