Comment by mdasen

There's a long story behind it, but Apple started saying that Mac OS X was UNIX, but UNIX was a trademark. So Apple decided that they either needed to alter OS X to conform to UNIX standards or buy the trademark. They chose the former.

> Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?

It's probably not about paying and more about tiny differences. Will it change anything for you? Almost certainly not. In fact, it might make things better for you. If anything, Apple's adherence to the UNIX spec can sometimes mean subtle differences in tools between macOS and BSD/Linux. Do you want things like grep or sed that conform to the UNIX spec or that work like grep and sed work in the real world?

And these differences are often small edge cases that don't come up much, but a spec is a spec.

The money is inconsequential for Apple, but at this point it probably makes more sense to just stop calling it UNIX and not worry about shipping a version of a tool exactly meets the UNIX spec - it'd be more useful for their users if it matched the behavior on Linux/BSD.