Comment by sedatk
3 years ago
Band-Aid, Bubble Wrap, Aspirin and many alike aren't generic either, but we use them as generic names. The same applies to Unix. Nobody means "V7 UNIX" or "Only OS implementations that conform to Open Group's standards" when they say "Minix is a Unix". They just mean "conforming to the original Unix design philosophy, as in file system structure, command-line tools, and process management". As I understand, Open Group's approval's just corporate politics to get permission for using the term "Unix" in marketing materials for enterprise customers, nothing else.
You can argue all you want that Minix (the most popular Unix in existence) or Ubuntu (most popular Linux distro in existence) aren't Unix. They're Unix. They're probably more Unix than most Unices on that list. Some company owning the brand and enforcing some arbitrary licensing scheme doesn't change that.
Look, I personally agree with you, and >1 Linux distro has passed the certification, which means that, strictly and precisely, Linux is a UNIX. (However that means that FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD technically are not UNIX.)
But that is not what the mainstream industry takes it to mean.
Whereas terms like xNix are, I submit, well understood.
Maybe I should register "xNix" as a trademark, so this debate would be over instantly. :)
:-D
It is certainly one solution.
As I recall, it was quite a long time after Linux was a thing that someone trademarked the name and donated it to the LF.