> 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.
"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."
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.
>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]
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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]
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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
16 replies →
GNU is "GNU is Not Unix"; unfortunately, it requires a left-recursive expansion that eventually exhausts the stack and terminates the process.
7 replies →
I'm pretty sure you are getting confused with the GNU recursive acronym, which was supposed to stand for "GNU's Not Unix".
12 replies →
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
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Ironically, given the thread, XNU stands for “X is not Unix”.
> 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?
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.
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.
8 replies →
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.
2 replies →
> 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
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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.
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.
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> 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?
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It's never been a thing in Silicon Valley. This sounds like someone misunderstanding or inflating the stakes.
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> 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-...
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
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I'm extremely curious about the "untimely death trigger conditions" part at the end...
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.
As I understand it he got $10m equivalent of cash, but not $10m of actual stock that would have grown tremendously.
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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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
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> 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...
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 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
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
4 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.)
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> 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.
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.
Did IL6 exist at the time? I'm guessing the informal name is just "the building after the ones which actually exist".
> 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!
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I think so?
IL7, I'm guessing typo, or they've escaped for long enough to forget exact details :D
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.
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.
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.
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