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Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

That explains why they got it UNIX certified back then, but couldn't they stop advertising macOS as UNIX and stop getting it certified? They even changed the name from Mac OS X to macOS since then.

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That's my question too, why continue to bother? Apple doesn't even have any separate "Server" OS anymore. I can't find anything mentioning UNIX on any apple.com marketing pages.

I guess it's just, might as well keep it going, as an option for future marketing if ever needed. Maybe it helps the salespeople in some enterprise deals? I mean, if it doesn't really cost anything to keep it.

Workstations, although I wouldn't consider the existing alternatives much of a proper workstation.

How exactly would you define a workstation?

A Mac Pro, with the same extension capabilities.

Which extension capabilities?

I gave you the model, check what is available.

My (wholly unsupported) guess is that there are government or megacorp bids somewhere for Unix systems for employees, and this checks that box. The buyer could update their requirements, but why do that when you can just make your vendor jump through the hoop?

Probably a government contract.

Not at Apple and don't have any knowledge here, but I'd imagine that the UNIX test suite, ever since it began passing, has been a useful set of additional regression tests even outside the certification context.

Does anyone want to be the person that removes regression tests from active use, only to be responsible when something breaks that would have been caught by that test? Far easier to just fix your code so the test passes.

(And for many years, OS X then macOS had a reputation for being rock-solid, capable of going much longer betwen restarts, going into BSOD much less frequently than Windows would. Having a set of third-party tests certainly didn't hurt this!)

I obviously don't know, but I could easily imagine that Apples legal team has flagged it as a potential risk and the cost of keep the certification up to date is minimal, compared to some imagined risk. Safer to pay the fee, and not having to worry about someone at Apple accidentally calling macOS a Unix system in public.

Also, Apple is a huge company, there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development. Better to not be that person and just rubberstamp the invoice from The Open Group. If management disagree, they can make the call, but they won't because the cost is to small for them to deal with.

The cost isn't negligible. The OS team at Apple is smaller than you'd think and has a tight schedule that cannot ever miss a ship date. Basically anything that uses anyone's attention has to be important.

> there's the question of who's going to make the call the not update a certification that's negligible within the scope of macOS development.

And one way that's managed is to have a DRI system which (ideally) prevents this from happening.

there’s no downside as far as i’m aware.

Famous last words

There isn't much downside, but it probably involves a small amount of money (paid for the certification) and it means spending time making sure that everything remains 100% within spec. There's lots of little edge cases where BSDs differ from the spec and it means that Apple needs to take care not to drift from the spec.

Apple remaining in spec sounds like a good thing from a compatibility point of view.

Am I missing something? I’m not sure why it’s coming off like people are complaining about this?

It’s a spec that doesn’t really matter in practice. Like some other comments said, Linux, BSD and Solaris are “Unix but not Unix(tm)”, and nobody cares.

As pointed out by amiga386 both here[1] and in earlier posts, macOS is not actually compliant with the Unix spec and never has been. This has apparently not been a hindrance for the certification of every single non-compliant version. Unix certification for Apple might not involve anything other than payment.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45239534

Presumably certification costs money (?)

Probably a small amount especially when they just need to tell them what changed

Given how little their target market cares about being a "real" unix, a small amount is probably more than the benefit it brings in.

We are talking about it.

Talk is cheap.

In marketing, getting others to talk about you is not cheap.

I don’t know what to tell you. Pick your theory:

A) apple does it for no reason and it is a waste of money B) they do it because they are aware or benefits that outweighs the small certification cost

I think it’s a quiet but deliberate strategy to keep macOS the spiritual successor to NeXTSTEP. While many of Jobs principles are under pressure at current day Apple, his ghost lives on.

This also doesn’t explain anything? Is getting Unix certified a jobs principle or a requirement to be a “spiritual successor”?

Jobs was very much anti-UNIX and is relatively easy to find it out.

NeXTSTEP had to support UNIX, because that was the workstation market they were after.

However notice how everything relevant for NeXT products was based on Objective-C userspace tooling and frameworks.

I think you mean literal successor. It's descended from NeXT's codebase. Mac OS X 10.0 was basically NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM.

There's a "ship of theseus" problem with this idea. There's enough different about OS X (different kernel and BSD base, different display server, different driver stack) that I think it's fair to describe it as a separate OS, yet clearly a lot _is_ directly taken from NS, especially the ObjC/application layer stuff. The waters are further muddled by the existence of Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0, which are much more clearly "NeXTSTEP 6 with Apple logos, Carbon and a Mac OS 9 VM". I don't think anyone outside the original OS X development team really knows just how much code was kept vs scrapped for the start of OS X development. Given that NS/OS was based on USL-encumbered BSD, it seems likely to me that nothing from the original NS kernel was kept for that, at a minimum.

That's why I said 6, Rhapsody/OS X Server is 5. The kernel is/was the same kernel as NeXTSTEP just updated. The main differences were Carbon, Display PDF instead of Display Postscript and the new theme.

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