IBM First To Receive UNIX 2003 Certification 167
Hobart writes "Last Wednesday, IBM's AIX was the first to receive the UNIX 2003 certification from The Open Group, beating out Sun, HP, SCO and the rest. No mention anywhere in the branded products register of any Linux/BSD distribution, or Mac OS X. Are any companies still developing software to this certification, or requiring it?"
Re:UNIX 2003? (Score:4, Informative)
There is a standard [pathname.com] on that.
Re:wow.. 28 comments (Score:4, Informative)
Re:off-brand Unices (Score:1, Informative)
noncommercial BSDs
Linux
OS XNote that there is nothing in this list to suggest that the adjective included in the first item applies to the others. Granted, the earlier syntax is a little ambiguous, but from the context, in which OS X was listed separately, despite the fact that it is a BSD, indicates that a distinction was being made between the noncommercial BSDs and the other BSDs (which would include the late BSDi and the still-thriving OS X).
Re:off-brand Unices (Score:4, Informative)
Think of government institutions for example that require that a platform must be Unix, VMS, or Windows.
If you want to try Linux guess what? You can't since according to the rules and regulations it is not a real unix. At least in the defense department and you can get in big trouble otherwise. Same is true for private businesses that deal with governmental contracts which state what they must run.
Its quite silly really, but yes Linux is used commercially and its quite important for government contracts to be officially labelled as a unix. A C2 certification would be nice as well since only Windows, OS/390, and AIX are officially labelled secure enough according to government paperwork thanks to the silly label.
To illustrate the point, why do you think MS invested so much money into making sure NT4 had limited and sorry possix support? The answer was to make NT4 a viable possix certified platform for the US government even though it never really was fully compatible, it was just the label.
Re:Better Working Conditions - More Stable Softwar (Score:5, Informative)
Are you on crack?
Solaris 1.x was SunOS 4 (BSD derived)+ OpenWindows; Solaris 2.x was SunOS 5 (SysV derived) + OpenWindows. Both were 32 bit operating systems running on 32 bit hardware (ignoring things like large file support), until UltraSPARC hardware came along and Solaris 7/2.7 added support for 64 bit operation in 1998 (this is 7 years after Solaris 1.0 shipped, and 6 years after Solaris 2.0 shipped).
Your post is factually inaccurate, bigoted, etc.
Re:What is the point ? (Score:5, Informative)
UNIX® 03 [unix.org] is POSIX. It is a "common update to IEEE Std 1003.1,1996 Edition, IEEE Std 1003.2, 1992 Edition, their ISO/IEC counterparts and the previous version of the Single UNIX Specification".
In the case of uname, compare the UNIX [opengroup.org] and the IBM [ibm.com] definitions. They look the same. In practise, the two ways it conforms to POSIX.1 yet differs from Solaris are the -m flag and the -r flag. With -m, AIX prints a hexadecimal number indicating the precise machine model rather than just the architecture (however this has become less useful on new IBM pSeries systems as "many new machines share a common machine ID of 4C"). This information can be augmented with the output of uname -M. With -r, I think only the major and minor version numbers are printed (it doesn't mention the point release since any point release should be compatible with other releases in that series). More precise information can be determined by running oslevel.
I agree it would be nicer if uname -m gave a human-readable architecture description as many other UNIX systems do, but POSIX doesn't require it be human readable or have a 1:1 mapping to CPU architecture.
Re:Why AIX? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Standards... (Score:2, Informative)
To be specific, Yellow dog linux.
link:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/06/us_navy_b