Comment by Luc
1 day ago
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.
I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
1 day ago
> To the Unix purist, this might appear wasteful and unnecessary, but macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.
I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified. https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
"I get what they mean, but macOS is even Unix certified."
What do they mean?
To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
He cannot control its default behaviour hence he wants to "slim MacOS down"
"UNIX" was a pun on the name of another OS that allegedly was accused of being too large and complex. That OS, Multics, was designed to run only on specific hardware from GE and later Honeywell
UNIX was a smaller, less complex alternative that, after its rewrite in C, could more easily run on a variety of hardware and be modified by the people using it
Apple does not allow people using MacOS to modify it
MacOS is proprietary; unlike AT&T's UNIX it has not been released into the research community resulting in non-commercial, open source "MacOS-like" OS projects (HackIntosh notwithstanding)
A user cannot write programs for MacOS without restriction by the company, e.g., prior approval, "developer" fees, etc.
MacOS cannot easily be used on a variety of hardware, only on Apple's proprietary hardware
Compared to non-commercial UNIX-like OS, MacOS is larger and more complex
https://eclecticlight.co/2023/12/04/macos-sonoma-is-setting-...
> To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.
Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.
You can write a UNIX program for MacOS though.
NB. The blog refers to (a) the "Unix purist" and (b) MacOS not being Unix. Arguably, (a) is more important, irrespective of whether (b) is true (IMO it's ambiguous)
For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)
At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people
Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"
HP-UX and IBM AIX are probably shocked to learn that they, too, are not Unix
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NB. I do not use a graphical layer or "terminal emulator". I only use textmode
> MacOS is proprietary
Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.
You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land, like Gnome, instead on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.
> The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well
I ran into a kernel panic specific to my macbook's hardware. How do I compile a new kernel with some extra debug printlns and boot it to figure out the panic?
On any actually open source operating system, this is doable, but I'm not holding my breath for any working instruction here. As far as I know, there's no way to modify the source code of, and then boot, the macOS kernel.
Perhaps "the core is open source" doesn't mean that I can run a modified kernel to you?
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The next sentence is also interesting actually.
> It’s a closed-source proprietary operating system
Most UNIX systems were proprietary & closed source though?
All of the commercial Unix operating systems were closed source.
The first open Unix-like is 386BSD which predates Linux. It was said that if 386BSD didn't get mired in a lawsuit, Torvalds would have used it and Linux would not exist.
Same applies to Windows NT POSIX subsystem, had Microsoft been serious about UNIX support on Windows, similar to how IBM and Unisys do on their mainframes and micros, there would be no reason to bother with Linux.
My case was exactly that, I got Slackware in 1995's Summer because that subsystem wasn't enough to do the DG/UX assignments at home.
And the reason BSD survived is the maligned ‘advertising clause’ that most later BSD-type licenses dropped. Berkeley countersued that AT&T had promoted that System V included vi, without the required attribution.
> macOS isn’t, and never has been, Unix.
MacOS is the most UNIXy of the UNIXes
1. Comparatively heavyweight
2. Proprietary
3. UNIX APIs
To beef up the historical comparisons, "creates their own workstations on RISC-derived processors" is also (historically) a sign of a (commerical) UNIX, too. It isn't to jarring to mentally replace "macOS Tahoe" with "NeXTSTEP 26".
Yes on paper. Submitted version differs from what customers run at home/work.
The compliance trope that a point-in-time-assessment can't be used to support a claim is kind of a lazy take. The certification explicitly states macOS v26.0 Tahoe.
While it's true that it wasn't always truly UNIX compliant, they put in the hard yards to become so (albeit to avoid a $200M lawsuit from The Open Group) [1]
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
To certify any version of macOS as UNIX, the security had to be significantly altered (disabling SIP) among a few other things. This is why what is shipped is not what is certified as UNIX. You can /make/ it match what is certified as an administrator, but that would be inadvisable.
https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
EDIT: And really, UNIX certification means nothing except to potentially government agencies and people who don't understand what UNIX and/or UNIX certification is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be.
Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)
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Im sorry, but i dont buy that. Unix certification has nothing to do with number of processes running or "efficiency"! The OS must be SUS compliant, i.e have all the core interfaces in place, all the correct utilities (awk, grep, vi, sed etc) and theres something about header files, filesystem requirements etc. even if the macOS submitted for certification is super trimmed down, it does not matter as long as its a true subset of what is shipped to consumers.
MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.
Unix is both a family of operating systems and also a trademark. The name is overloaded - "Unix" is more than one thing at the same time. In addition, the trademark is "UNIX" and the operating system family is "Unix"
MacOS is both UNIX and also not Unix at the same time.
If the trademark holders decided to UNIX certify my cat, which is well within their legal right to do so, would that make her UNIX?
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