The story behind OS X’s Unix compliant certification | Hacker News Reader

The story behind OS X’s Unix compliant certification

quora.com

456 pointsazinman2159 comments

> The lawsuit was filed because the owner of Mac OS X Server kept putting “UNIX” on the web site, and all other marketing collateral for the Server product.

Like https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750

"First of all, [Mac OS X] is Unix-based, as you know. What you may not know is that Apple has become the #1 supplier of Unix in the world — bigger than Sun; bigger than Linux; bigger than anyone! But we don't want to rest on that. We think we have one of the best versions of Unix out there — Jagwire makes it even better with a whole bunch of cool new Unix things."

As the OP implies (missing Tiger), Leopard was the first certified version: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-os-x-leopard-rec...

Doesn't linux stand for "linux is not unix"?

No.

>Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year. Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but initially dismissed it as too egotistical.[13]

>In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991. Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. So, he named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting Torvalds.[13] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux".

>To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced ([ˈliːnɵks]), Torvalds included an audio guide (audio speaker iconlisten (help·info)) with the kernel source code.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming

When crossing languages shouldn’t pronunciation change?

For names I would say no.

That does not work in general. Some sounds just do not exist in some languages. Also, for example a name can sound quite different pronounced with an Irish and a Yorkshire accent, and there are similar distinctions in most languages. Which one becomes the canonical prononciation then?

I think that for proper names, it's common courtesy to try to prounounce someone's name as close as possible to the way they pronounce it themselves. This may be difficult when using sounds that simply don't exist in your language, and I'm not suggesting going as far as learning how to pronounce new consonants. But, if someone spells their name "St John" but introduces themselves as "Mr Sinjohn" (sɪndʒɪn), it's common courtesy to refer to them as Mr "Sinjohn", not Mr "Saint John". Or, if their name is written as Xi (in Pinyin), but read as Shi, you should call them "Shi", not "Ksi", even though you may not be using the exact right "Sh" sound, and you will probably not be able to match the right pitch contour.

I'm already happy when people are able to copy/paste my name properly in an email. It seems 30% of the people aren't even able to do that.

I kind of like when I go to a foreign county and people pronounce my name in a different way than I'm used to hearing it. Having them struggle to get it "right" just doesn't work anyway and makes them struggle needlessly. Even in my own country, there are two common ways to pronounce my last name and while I only use one way myself, I really don't mind when people use the other way.

I named my son, "Alistair", and there seems to be a million ways people pronounce that. He doesn't seem to care either.

Human language is one place where "comes as close as you reasonably can to following Postel's Law" seems to work out pretty well.

Oh try that when your name is written the same in many languages. Amelia, Lionel, Robert... Yeah I prefer people not worry too much and call me something I understand and move on. My wife's name is Asia (diminutive for her official name, Joanna) which is to be pronounced in Polish. She gets really annoyed when French people try and pronounce it. The 'si' sound is closer to the English 'sh' than the French 'ch' and we don't have this 'sh' sound in French. It really sounds ugly in French...

The effort is appreciated but it's grating and she often ends up kindly telling them 'use Joanna instead'.

The respectful way is to approximate it using the phonemes available in the target language.

But that doesn't mean using the rules that language uses to translate the letters to phonemes! For example, English has a perfectly good sound for /i/ - so don't read foreign names with that sound in them as /ai/, just because the Latin spelling of said foreign name would be pronounced that way if it were an English word.

There are many cases where it does.

For example if you say "Australia" in an Australian accent, Japanese people probably wouldn't understand. So you'd have to use the "correct" Japanese pronunciation: "oh-su-to-ra-ri-a".

Another example is "Hyundai", which seems to have at least five different pronunciations. Apparently Koreans say "HYUN-day"[1], while the British say "high-UUN-digh", Americans say "HUN-day"[2] or something like "Han-die" in Spanish-speaking parts. Australians say "he-UN-day"[3]. Note to prescriptivists that this is how Hyundai's various subsidiaries say it in ads.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-25813198

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI3-fJlmnoM&t=50s

[3]: https://youtu.be/RyupLuOVny0?t=15

Pronunciation changes even when crossing accents, let alone languages. The prescriptivists will say there is a correct pronunciation, and any deviation from it is wrong. But the descriptivists will ask why it matters if we all understand that we’re referring to the same thing. It’s an age-old debate.

I find it amusing that Linus himself pronounces both with the same vowel sounds, indicating that obviously the kernel is named for its creator.

While my American cohorts refuse to use the same vowels, choosing “Lie” for the first syllable of the man’s name, and “Lih” for the first syllable of the kernel. Then berate me for following the pattern but using US English pronunciation rules.

But you guys know what I’m talking about, so just shut up and let’s get on with this deployment, mmk?

* insert oxford comma debate/every grammer debate ever*

Linus never said "this is how Linux should be pronounced". He only said "I pronounce Linux as 'Linux'".

I also pronounce Linux as "Linux."

I pronounce it as "Linux" in German, while I pronounce it as "Linux" in English.

I'm pretty sure you are getting confused with the GNU recursive acronym, which was supposed to stand for "GNU's Not Unix".

To me it's a cheeky backronym-esque observation inspired by GNU. Another one I like is "Windows is not DOS".

I mean, Windows ran on DOS for a decade, so I'm not really seeing this one.

An interesting backronym is Wine being "Wine Is Not an Emulator". That one has an interesting history.

The original author first was going to call it winemu, but didn't like that. He shortened it to "wine", which led him to think of "whine" and "whinny". He liked "whine" but thought that was too long so "wine" it was.

The first suggestion of "Wine is Not an Emulator" was in 1993, when there were concerns Microsoft might raise trademark objects to "Windows Emulator". No one took that name suggestion seriously.

It wasn't until 1997 that it was adapted, as an alternative. In late 1997, the Wine FAQ said

> The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use whichever one you like best.

The shift to not mentioning it being a Windows emulator happened later. The release notes for 981108 said

> This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows emulator.

and for 981211 said

> This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix.

As far as I've been able to glean from old Usenet posts, there were two reasons they stopped mentioning it being an emulator.

1. It could be used for more than just running Windows binaries under Unix. If you had source to a Windows program you could compile it on Unix and link it with Wine to give you a port of the Windows program. Wine was now a Windows compatibility system that included more than just an emulator. It was an emulator and a porting library.

2. Computers were getting fast enough that people were starting to run hardware emulators to do things like run game binaries from old consoles or old personal computers. Such emulators were not very fast. This might lead users to think that emulation was inherently slow, which might turn them off from trying Wine under the mistaken impression that it too would be slow.

Wine, when used to run Windows binaries rather than as a library when porting, is in fact still an emulator just like it was when Bob Amstadt first wrote it. Nothing technical changed when they added the backronym, or changed the text for the 981211 release notes.

But now we have plenty of people who have only ever seen the backronym, and the only emulators they have used that call themselves emulators have been emulating hardware, and so will insist that for something to be an emulator is must be emulating hardware.

Also note that these days Windows itself is an "emulator" in much the same way Wine is when running apps in the various compatibility modes for earlier Windows versions.

Still, even today people tend to think of emulation as implying some sort of required slowdown. Unlike something like ARM or console emulation, most slowness in Wine has just been bugs rather than an inherent limitation of the concept.

I recall reveal years ago, I hung out in a forum where the users where very pendantic about claiming emulation only refers to hardware level emulation, like on an FPGA, and everything else was simulation.

Interestingly, I’ve never heard that anywhere else since.

This reminds me of a hardcore Scheme fan I once knew who was really mad about JavaScript so he would only ever call it ECMAScript.

Hackers have always been fond of pedantry:) It's like how I got really annoyed by people calling the whole OS "Linux", so now I typically refer to "NT, Darwin, and GNU/Linux" out of sheer spite. (I'm aware that this is not helpful to anyone, and I do scale it to make sure everyone can still understand each other, but as personal flaws^wquirks go I think I'm doing just fine;])

Oh I’ve run into this too, from trollish standards maximalists in the late 90s on IRC. They thought it was super hilarious to be overbearingly pedantic about W3C specs and such to random people.

I've heard the opposite since the term software emulation has its roots in mimicking architectures in software but full blown virtualization simulates the entire system in software.

The problem is the backronym would be wrong.

Linux is far closer to “Linus’s Unix” (and that may actually be how it was named) than it would be to Linux is not Unix.

Recursive backronym: “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor” (originally “Personal Home Pages”)

I once suggested an alternative: “Powering Hypertext & Programs” (https://alanhogan.com/conversations/php/acronym)

Could you expand the recursion a few iterations, and see if it makes sense?

There is an embedded OS called Xinu which does stand for “Xinu is not Unix”, and also happens to be Unix spelled backwards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinu

The MacOS kernel is in fact called XNU, which means what you think.

XNU, the Darwin kernel, is not a recursive acronym like GNU. Officially stands for X is Not Unix.

GNU is "GNU is Not Unix"; unfortunately, it requires a left-recursive expansion that eventually exhausts the stack and terminates the process.

Me: just casually reading HN.

Also me, to myself: hold our beer we’re going to nerd snipe ourselves and write this as a regex that can’t be flagged as ReDoS.

  /G(N)(U) is \1ot \2nix/

Which means the 'G' could have been replaced by _anything_! Same for the first 'P' in PHP Hypertext Preprocessor

PHP originated as Personal Home Page. The current official name is a backronym.

>PHP originated as Personal Home Page.

I guess Worlds Most Efficient Security Violation Generator was tool long (WMESVG)

A regressive opinion not representative of modern PHP.

Thanks for pointing that out. Several years ago, I had a small server running PHP - I had to patch it 3 times in 4 months. It spent more time with patches than I spent rewriting it from scratch.

I just checked the PHP CVEs, amd it seems it has gone quite a while without high scoring CVEs - so, good for them

Ironically, given the thread, XNU stands for “X is not Unix”.

One thing I've wondered is that since Apple claimed UNIX compatibility for Tiger and earlier without passing the certification, could the lawsuit have still proceeded but seek damages for previous versions of Mac OS X? Imagine damages like "give us a percentage of all revenue made from selling Mac OS X Tiger and earlier".

The article hints at the answer - the Open Group wanted to stay relevant, and certification for OSX was a good way to do that, so they weren't too interested in ruffling Apple's feathers.

Before Macworld NY 2002 the "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" ad was already running in national magazines.

> I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high level, ever again, in the future.

I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?

Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly he fucked up, just to spite him.

"You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to discharge fleeting grudges.

> how badly he fucked up

I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?

> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO consider you someone to count on again?

> And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?

Because he built this industry.

> If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up.

Are you under the impression that for example lawyers are fired every time they lose a case and a company has to pay out?

Not every company would, but the CEOs of the major tech companies that a guy with Terry's impact would have probably liked to work at? I'd buy it. Those guys talked all the time, and I doubt they were gonna let one hire get in the way of a major corporate relationship.

> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

If I understand correctly,in this particular situation, fucking up would cost Apple at least $200M--so it had to be a total success for him.

I'd put the initial fuck-up on Apple marketing, who used the UNIX trademark without license nor compatibily.

This was an attempt to repair the damage that had already been done, by passing the UNIX compliance required to become an official, paid, licensee.

In bigcorps, marketing can freely make false claims, and engineering is on the hook for delivery.

You are technically correct that this was a sales fuckup, but the shit storm would 100% be directed towards the “underperforming, delivery-target missing” programmers.

Isn't this a good example of engineering and management working together to make changes over multiple departments?

The engineers got time to asses if the project was feasible and what kind of support they need. Management fully supported them and made the other departments play ball and they made allies in other departments that helped them making the changes necessary.

They were asked if they could do a job and given the time and ressources to asses the situation. If they had any doubts they could've said no and let the legal department take over.

It's legals mistake. Ads have to be run by them. They should have caught it.

That'd depend on exactly how bad the screwup was but Steve Jobs was notoriously unforgiving if you made a promise and didn't have a good reason for missing it. That might not have been the case here, since they clearly slipped it due to the Intel transition, but if he was in an unforgiving mood or someone else was looking for a scapegoat, remember this example of how closed the community was at the time:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...

I think the "Steve Jobs" part is just a random assumption from the parent.

More likely he'd have problem being hired at that level simply because he would be associated with a major failed project, Jobs or no Jobs.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

"OK, I've seen enough, " Steve interrupted me. "It's great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations."

But then he paused, and stared at me for a moment with an incredibly intense gaze, as if he was sizing me up or maybe just trying to scare me.

"But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple."

"What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.

"There's no way that you could have written that program without confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge whatever you like for it."

I started to get angry. "The program is only half finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I won't be motivated to finish it."

Steve gave me another intense stare as he paused for a few seconds. Then he stated a single number, without explanation.

"One hundred thousand dollars."

"I don't know," I told him, "I think it's probably worth a lot more than that."

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."

I didn't seem to have any alternative but to capitulate to Steve's price setting,

there are better Steve stories on that site, mostly about abuse and psychological manipulation.

Which proves and is related to the story how?

> "I entered Steve's office with a bit of trepidation, because I thought that Switcher was worth at least a quarter of a million dollars to Apple, but I was sure that Steve would never want to pay me that much. But I was also proud of Switcher, and was interested in seeing how Steve would react to it."

The previous paragraph

Between that and his ":)" response to the Google recruiter getting fired because they were unaware of the collusion going on between Apple and Google, he will go down as one of the worst, most abusive tech barons in history.

I think he has already gone down in tech history, and it wasn't as "one of the worst, most abusive tech barons".

Unfortunately so, to the extent that this is true.

Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

My personal favorite of the early Apple stories was the one where Jean-Louis Gassée saw him park his big dumb Mercedes in a disabled parking spot and said "I never realized those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped" [0].

[0]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

>Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

Yes, we have anecdotes (plus all the other nice things people said about him, including his daughter in her book and the author of TFA elsewhere in Quora).

Those are not what he is remembered about though, but for building one of the biggest companies on Earth (at times, the biggest), plus doing it twice in his 20s and in his 40s, while also building two other companies (one worth billions for its movies, the other sold to his first company for half a billion), plus defining several modern consumer tech markets and/or phenomena.

And of course, there are far far worse employers than a demanding jerk (abusers, rapists, racists, thieves, even murderous CEOs and founders) - and with less saving graces and nowhere near the same results.

Well...when you put it like that...

Also, at least per a lot of his defenders, most (maybe not all ) of the anecdotes were pre-NeXT Steve vs post-NeXT Steve...albeit who knows what to believe...

I was around Apple pre Next and people there were already afraid of Steve

He was also remembered as being hired as a line engineer at Atari early on in his career who by all accounts would have been fired almost immediately if it hadn't been for Wozniak doing a lot of his work for him.

Entrepreneur most definitely, engineer... not so much.

But even then, probably still a better engineer than many people who are smugly declaring that he wasn't a good engineer.

After all, he was hired by Atari, and got parts delivered to him personally by Bill Hewlett and an internship at HP as he was a young electronics enthusiast.

Of course if he's being compared to Wozniak, well different league.

It's never been a thing in Silicon Valley. This sounds like someone misunderstanding or inflating the stakes.

I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was still there and it definitely sounds odd.

I had never heard of project-based profit sharing or being fired and named/shamed for non-delivery. I had personally seen coding mistakes cost tens of millions in lost revenue and the developers were still there and many got promoted.

Surely if he was promised $10 million and Apple didn't pay up there would be grounds for a lawsuit. Especially since that stock would be worth so much more today.

Normally it wouldn’t. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long held grudges that fundamentally fractured business relationships (eg IIRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something, and similar reaction to integrating ZFS being announced early). Guy was an asshole, but he was an extraordinarily powerful asshole.

In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It’s not often they continue to hold much power as a corpse.

Still ten minutes to edit the post.

Meh, I’d rather walk my pup and eat dinner. If people are curious they’ll find it

Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil.

Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.

At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.

Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary component, Sun might've actually gone with it.

Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation market. They had everything to gain from making Unix mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and pretty much nothing to lose.

FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was removed only after Oracle bought Sun.

Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.

Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best buddies.

> Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.

I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks, are incredibly hard to kill.

I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.

Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.

I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.

> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something

may also be the major issues with their chipset.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254

Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro which was nice!

Nvidia still offered the "unofficial" official driver for a long time that let you run unsupported GPUs in Mac Pros or Hackintoshes for quite a while. I ran a couple of Maxwell generation NVidia parts this way, even though macOS out of the box didn't support them, Keppler wasn't the last that worked.

The only downside back then was when a new macOS release hit, you would have to wait for Nvidia to release the updated third party driver. IIRC there was one major OS ten release I was stuck waiting a few months before the driver landed. This extended the lifespan of a lot of Mac Pros greatly!

It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.

"Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.

See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.

The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple.

This is why every single NVidia customer during this period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up making several large compensation payments to several big vendors such as HP too etc.

Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as tech media termed it at the time that Apple's relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not.

> https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan...

As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I can't agree. There was an entire settled class action lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid web.archive.org, but you can still find the details:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidia...

Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years.

However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death).

Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.

[0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP

> Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised

Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such great products because of the tight integration that would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a hardware and software company.

Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company.

But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware teams as you would expect.

> Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.

I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets to the website a few days before the launch. It was discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a flurry of meetings to fix it.

The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs.

I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.

> We bought begrudging buy-in from Mike Smith (yes, that* Mike Smith) by having him rewrite the file locking code.*

Anyone know who is that Mike Smith?

I suspect its the Mike Smith who was a FreeBSD committer and core team member 20-ish years ago.

This? [1] May be worth its own HN submission. But that mail, 20 years ago reads to me the problem with today's open source aren't that much different to now.

[1] https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-s-no...

Wow, $10 million in Apple stock...

Reading this, I feel like I've done things that were this big... or a decent fraction of it... and never got so much as a thank you

Sounds like he didn't get it: https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-a-better-employer-from-...

Oh wow. What a blow. The way I make myself feel better about all the stocks and options I was never offered in my career is by assuming something like that would have happened to me.

I'm extremely curious about the "untimely death trigger conditions" part at the end...

I think this may be a more relevant link to the 'I didn't get paid' - and explains a little more of the veiled threats to whomever Simon Patience is from your link.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple

https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9

Apple Vice President Core OS Software (2002–2014)

Wow that speaks so bad of apple.

We weren't there, we don't actually know what was promised.

I mean basically don't trust SV corporate- most have learned this the hard way.

As I understand it he got $10m equivalent of cash, but not $10m of actual stock that would have grown tremendously.

Why wouldn't he just buy the $10m of Apple stock then?

Couldn't he have bought Apple stock with the proceeds?

Anyone have insight on whether this level of performance incentive compensation was more or less common 20 years ago than now and how to credibly negotiate for them as an employee instead of leaving and contracting on value pricing? I'm afraid the answer is "if you have to ask..." Is it mostly just executives or are high level ICs ever successful here? In the public arena I only really hear about it happening for strategic acquihires and execs.

I have a reasonable amount of respect for Terry's technical competence, but a ... quirk of his personality is that he doesn't really respect the bounds around the truth.

If you know those bounds, you can filter him, but in general reading / listening to Terry is necessarily an active and selective process.

It's fair to say that some of the things he describes in this piece are true; he names some real people, and talks about some things that actually happened, but the tale as presented is more "inspired by" than "faithful to" the truth and many of the details are pure invention.

One thing that is true is that some of the folks he names - and praises - did indeed work extremely hard for much less recognition than they deserved.

It is interesting how much weight the author puts on bypassing process and bureaucracy to the success of the project.

He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.

> that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent.

This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.

Most people?

(Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in general).

I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense to you.

To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people interact with other people. Social rules? Those that "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?...

Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid, but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal consequences - it's about the principle. But total abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help people break that law should there be a need for it. Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society, sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and sometimes the other way around.

To be honest, I have no idea where the line between "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist" actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I guess.

When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without telling me why. I think they were interpreting my questions as undermining their authority, which ironically made them less likely to actually answer me, but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to work in a field where I generally don't have to do things that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents were warning me about back then ;)).

Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority personality trait".

Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.

I find people will go with the flow and basically follow orders. Most people won't shake the boat.

> It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent.

Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit of course https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-bet...

Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.

It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.

Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.

What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work.

Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.

I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor" bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable response.

Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they will have many restrictions on any changes going in, including feature work from their own team, let alone some random potentially behavior changing ones.

Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even if making tests is hard.

There have been a few times where I have spent longer (sometimes way longer) building the infrastructure to make a test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the time there's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently important that they might want to bypass such.

The view from here is that doing anything at big SV tech is way more politics than tech.

A list of certified UNIX operating systems: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

I'm quite surprised to see that OpenServer is still on that list, and Solaris isn't...

I think that IBM z/OS is the strangest entry on the list. It’s also notable that Hawaii EulerOS is a Linux distro based on CentOS

So Huawei got Unix certification for Linux? If so, that’s a pretty big deal!

They did, but (IIRC, and this is an old memory) to make GNU/Linux pass certification you have to hack it up quite a bit; lots of GNU tools have POSIX modes that significantly change how they behave - things like du defaulting to 1024-byte units by default but using 512-byte units if you set POSIXLY_CORRECT because parts of the standard are, um, "interesting". But yes, neat to know that it can be done.

AFAIR, Red Hat once had a version of their system certified, too. But it's not as useful as one might think - the certification applies to a specific distro and release only, so it needs to be renewed with every new release.

Thanks z/OS UNIX System Services.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-zos...

I think this is less technical and more 'political' / contractual, as it used to be:

> This is to certify that Oracle Corporation has entered into a Trademark License Agreement with X/Open Company Limited in accordance with which the following are registered under the X/Open Brand Program.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20191022053203/https://www.openg...

* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3642.htm

An August 2018 tweet:

> We are pleased to announce that Oracle Corporation has achieved certification to the UNIX V7 Product Standard for: Oracle Solaris 11.4 Operating System and later on SPARC-based and X86 based platforms. For more information: http://ow.ly/8fT830lBjfu #UNIX

* https://twitter.com/theopengroup/status/1034785507610447872

There's a renewal process:

* https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/docs/UNIXV7_Certificatio...

Oracle did not bother renewing in April 2019:

> Solaris supports SPARC and x86-64 workstations and servers from Oracle and other vendors. Solaris was registered as compliant with UNIX 03 until 29 April 2019.[6][7][8]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris

Extra funny considering that Solaris is built from actual AT&T UNIX™ code and OpenServer was, last I looked, FreeBSD with some patches.

(Or, honestly, sad; RIP Sun.)

Depends on the version of OpenServer. Up to 6 (released in 2005) it was a descendant of Xenix, so plenty of AT&T (well Bell Labs I guess) code still in there probably.

Later on SCO finally died and Xinuos got the trademark, which was reused for a FreeBSD-derived product as well

It's honestly a little weird that Oracle doesn't see the value in continuing to have Solaris certified, same with Redhat and RHEL, but Apple continue to get macOS certified.

At this point Solaris is a zombie product that's only still on sale to bring in revenue from people who're so committed to the platform they'll buy it no matter what.

The development team was basically disbanded a while back, and the hardware team even further back than that, and any customer who's not going to be put off by that seems fairly unlikely to be put off by the lack of certification.

> But it was a red letter day when the header files passed testing, and we celebrated by going out to IL6 — the informal name for the BJ’s restaurant, just off the Apple campus.

IL7, I thought? IL6 is an existing building at the southernmost end of the campus.

Did IL6 exist at the time? I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist".

I think so?

> Did IL6 exist at the time?

It did, so I'm guessing it was just a mistake. I recall Pepper Mill/BJ's being referred to as either "R&D 7" or "IL 7".

> I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist".

Yep!

Concur. I had also always heard of it as “IL7” when I worked in IL1 & 6. An aside, the balcony & gamesroom in IL2 was a nice little escape for an afternoon beverage as well.

IL7, I'm guessing typo, or they've escaped for long enough to forget exact details :D

BJs is indeed referred to as IL7 and the restaurant even had an official-looking “IL7” placard on the rear entrance.

Hate to nit-pick the story at all though, it’s a great. Stories like this floated all around Apple, and I stopped being surprised by them after awhile. That level of focus, drive, and accomplishment by just a handful of engineers was in the company’s bones.

Interesting part:

> We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community — particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests. You have absolutely no idea how much Apple contributed to the Open Source community, as part of this project, because it was a secret project — at least to people outside Apple — so we didn’t advertise the fact. But I expect we contributed about two million lines of code, to hundreds of Open Source projects, over the course of that year. A lot of gratitude — but it wasn’t collective, and so Apple was still faulted for “using Open Source code, but never contributing back”. We fixed at least 15 major gcc bugs, for example. You have no idea.

I suspect this (Apple employees contributing individually) is still often the case. Apple is all over the place on their general attitude towards open source, but they’re notoriously extremely secretive. About almost everything that isn’t in a press release, curated announcement or publication, or required by law. Loudly proclaiming their investment in open source, without some corresponding PR goal, is essentially free tea leaves for people to speculate about What They’re Building In There.

I’m likewise sure there are some handshake agreements between many open source maintainers and Apple-paid contributors to just… not spill those beans.

Apple chose the secrecy culture. It's also their problem if their contributions are so secretive that they have a PR problem about not enough OSS contributions.

Am I doing the math right? If he got $10M in stock in 2005, that is worth approximately $1.3B now?

If you look up thread there’s posts where he indicated he never got the stock he was promised.

As other comments noted, he (and his team) apparently got shafted.

Classic Apple

How would it have been $200 million to remove the UNIX logo from the marketing materials?

a 200 million lawsuit plus removing the unix stuff

It's pleasant to hear that lots of FOSS software benefited from this effort.

Archive / mirror:

https://archive.fo/iWgqx

> By this time, I knew pretty much every one of the 13 million lines of kernel code in the Mac OS X kernel.

narcissism overload; stopped reading there

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