Comment by greggsy

1 day ago

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...

13 comments

greggsy

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p_ing  19 hours ago

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 ;-)

  • rayiner  19 hours ago

    > is. Or why being "certified UNIX" is generally meaningless: see the BSDs, which are much closer to "UNIX" origins than macOS will ever be

    MacOS is BSD over Mach, which is itself derived from BSD.

  • runjake  18 hours ago

    > Or Windows, which is frankly just has better architected internals and abandons legacy UNIX ;-)

    Current macOS user, and former NT kernel dabbler and VMS user here. That's highly debatable.

    On the kernel side, Windows is still filled with legacy VMS-isms. Eg: Object Manager (object/resource model), named objects, handles, how processes and threads work, vmem, scheduling etc etc

    On the userspace side, Windows is still filled with legacy DOS-isms.

    Don't me wrong, I love the underlying Windows OS, despite its many quirks, but it's filled with perhaps even more legacy cruft and definitely isn't any sort of step above anything else.

    I also don't believe anyone actually runs macOS in a UNIX-compliant configuration. Rather, it's a checkbox on some RFP and nobody is clued into why it's actually there, because all the people that did know have since retired.