from Hacker News

macOS Sequoia is certified to Unix 03

by john_alan on 9/30/24, 4:07 PM with 50 comments

  • by bluejekyll on 9/30/24, 4:51 PM

    I’ve always thought POSIX compliance is the primary thing vendors should be targeting for portability. I was trying to find something that would explain the difference between POSIX and UNIX compliance, but there’s not great sources on this specifically.

    I imagine UNIX is a superset of POSIX, I’d be curious if anyone knows of a simple comparison between the two?

  • by superkuh on 9/30/24, 4:45 PM

    It may be "certified" but that hardly matters when MacOS Sequoia is a pay-to-access-networking operating system. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/663875 https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...

    It's absolutely wild. They've broken multicast and UDP for all applications that do not pay Apple money (like open source, community coded ones). Which means things like mouse/keyboard sharing applications like synergy/barrier/etc stopped working in many cases. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. And there's no way for a human to control this "multicast entitlement" on their own OS how they like it. The only way for applications on Sequoia to have multicast network access is for some commercial developer pay for it.

    This is very not Unix. Careful out there "up"grading.

  • by wenc on 9/30/24, 4:49 PM

    I remember a time when this mattered in terms of branding (Mac OS X being a Unix). It meant that the OS was “industrial-class”. This was against a backdrop of Macs not being seen as serious machines, unlike Windows machines which were more “corporate”.

    But nowadays macOS is so pervasive that a Unix certification doesn’t buy much brand cachet. Perhaps it might help for specific compliance requirements but those are likely the minority.

  • by Asmod4n on 9/30/24, 4:57 PM

    I’ve always wondered, since back when OS X 10.5 got apples first Unix certification.

    What does that help you as a developer? Can you just download the spec for free, built against it and have a working app for several platforms that not only compiles and runs but also behaves the same on all of them?

  • by boomskats on 9/30/24, 4:59 PM

  • by ranger_danger on 9/30/24, 4:45 PM

    Are there any other operating systems today that are Unix certified?

  • by betaby on 9/30/24, 4:43 PM

    ... with some GNU components stuck in 2006.

  • by WD-42 on 9/30/24, 4:50 PM

    I love how Apple basically cp -R BSD, became the most profitable company in the world off it and gave nothing back except a walled garden and lock in. But hey it’s still technically Unix.