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Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry

94 points john_alan 3 hours ago 92 comments

nsagent 2 hours ago | parent

I see macOS 26 listed under the Unix 03 standard. Was macOS 27 listed and then removed? The submission title + site contents combined do not give enough info to assess what exactly was silently removed.

john_alan 2 hours ago | parent

macOS was listed on the main register (the link in this submission).

It was Tahoe, it’s since been removed.

The UNIX03 page still lists it, but I believe that’s a mistake.

macOS has been removed from the main register/list.

dofm 2 hours ago | parent

The index page seems to only list the status of current OS versions.

Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.

nsagent 1 hour ago | parent

The this is much ado about nothing. Every single entry on the page you linked goes to its product page with the exact Unix standard it is certified as. Once you select a filter, you cannot get back to unfiltered list without the back button on the browser.

This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.

cowsandmilk 2 hours ago | parent

Better for both sides. They clearly have different visions for what an OS should do.

drdexebtjl 2 hours ago | parent

What? The Open Group has no vision for what an OS should do, it simply writes standards describing what implementations are already doing.

ShinyLeftPad 2 hours ago | parent

If true, a better title would be "macOS is no longer UNIX certified".

sdcfgy 2 hours ago | parent

Well Unix as a standard is completely dead. macOS as a Unix is completely dead. I expect another branch in the already complicated as hell tree of Unixes.

john_alan 2 hours ago | parent

Indeed.

I just wonder if macOS will stop being UNIX like.

That is, whilst it still has home brew and a BSD core it’s great. If that goes away it’s no longer a viable alternative to Linux.

totetsu 2 hours ago | parent

What would that going away look like?

sdcfgy 2 hours ago | parent

Swift on Mach

lloeki 2 hours ago | parent

I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style.

throawayonthe 59 minutes ago | parent

would be awesome

jeremyjh 52 minutes ago | parent

Its called colima and its excellent.

https://colima.run/

moritz 29 minutes ago | parent

and they have a first-party one now as well

https://github.com/apple/container

pjmlp 44 minutes ago | parent

Of course they were, even NeXTSTEP was designed to be compatible with UNIX only to compete with UNIX workstations like those from Sun.

Neither Apple nor NeXT had a UNIX culture, and efforts like A/UX and mkLinux were never that much serious.

Had they acquired Be, BeOS was even less UNIXy than NeXTSTEP.

sdcfgy 2 hours ago | parent

It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on.

Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.

Brainspackle 2 hours ago | parent

I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.

sneak 2 hours ago | parent

You’re in a bubble. Windows is still huge, especially in middling companies that dictate it and standard HP/Dell/Lenovo hardware for all 3k staff.

It’s insanely common.

orf 1 hour ago | parent

His point isn’t that it’s common, it’s that a unix-like environment is a key selling point.

Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment

9dev 1 hour ago | parent

You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.

jeremyjh 54 minutes ago | parent

In deeply saddens me to think that there is a developer who has not installed gnutils and put them earlier in the PATH.

The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.

jonhohle 5 minutes ago | parent

It really is that simple. No different from a BSD or even a non-GNU (busybox, etc.) Linux distribution. If you like GNU tools, use them.

9dev 4 minutes ago | parent

It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.

The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.

Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.

pjmlp 47 minutes ago | parent

The problem is that being a developer is not a synonymous with UNIX.

spacedcowboy 37 minutes ago | parent

It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.

At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”

Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.

torben-friis 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models.

jeremyjh 58 minutes ago | parent

Right but in this thread it is pretty clear we are talking about the money they make from MacOS.

kibwen 16 minutes ago | parent

The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps.

jmcs 1 hour ago | parent

Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS.

pjmlp 49 minutes ago | parent

I bet you are located in US.

mrweasel 1 hour ago | parent

It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.

Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.

mingus88 1 hour ago | parent

> Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux.

I’ve been in this industry for a long time now. Linux always had more credibility among devs and ops folk. This “starting to move” view is weird.

My view is that OS X was acceptable by these teams because it was close enough to Linux and corporate could deal with it.

When I worked in corporate IT Linux was simply not an option for a primary workstation because there was no standard configuration or management tooling that made everyone happy. Macs were an easy compromise.

pjmlp 47 minutes ago | parent

Game and app developers certainly not.

jameshart 42 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft just shipped a full-fledged first class Linux container runtime as part of Windows[1]. I don’t think it even made front page of HN, which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment, but it is absolutely something Apple should be offering as a first class capability on OS X. The compatibility of the host OS file system with being mounted into docker images makes it a better environment for running such things.

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...

Telemakhos 47 minutes ago | parent

In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.

skywalqer 1 hour ago | parent

macOS as Unix is not dead – the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).

sdcfgy 1 hour ago | parent

We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier.

coldtea 27 minutes ago | parent

Linux doesn't have an "architecture".

sdcfgy 24 minutes ago | parent

You know what I mean. ARM vs x86-64 -and- macOS API vs Linux API.

And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.

jeremyjh 1 hour ago | parent

The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades.

zitterbewegung 2 hours ago | parent

It could be that macOS 27 never got Unix certified. Wayback Machine on Oct 7th only shows macOS 26 being Unix certified.

https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...

john_alan 2 hours ago | parent

27 wasn’t certified and 26 was listed but is now removed.

kylepomykala 2 hours ago | parent

I could see this being corporate incompetence or a genuine deviation. I wonder which one it is.

zerozerotwo 2 hours ago | parent

I never quite understood what the point of this was beyond marketing. Linux is also not listed probably because no one ever paid to have it listed

stingraycharles 2 hours ago | parent

Enterprise. Checklists.

drob518 2 hours ago | parent

And Gnu’s Not UNIX.

onionisafruit 1 hour ago | parent

It would be marvelous to see GNU/Linux certified as a UNIX specifically with rms’s preferred GNU/Linux as the name.

steve1977 1 hour ago | parent

They could even just call it GNU is now UNIX.

It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.

dofm 1 hour ago | parent

It is specific Linux distributions that would be Unix-certified. Huawei had one; not sure if it has ever been on this page.

zarzavat 1 hour ago | parent

Apparently it was for legal reasons. Apple was sued by the Open Group for describing Mac OS X as Unix® so they decided it was cheaper to bring it up to spec rather than to fight the lawsuit.

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...

https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

mrweasel 1 hour ago | parent

It was a legal problem, and an interesting story: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

liamgm 20 minutes ago | parent

Enterpise espeically banking need standard and certification for reliability thats why , also certain Linux distro had certified before from China based on RHEL.

This is UNIX 03 certified OS with OSS alternatives from I gathered on internet :

- Apple OS X 10.7 - Apple macOS 26 , provide OSS Darwin 9 - Darwin 26

- Oracle Solaris 10 / 11 , provide OSS OpenSolais , then Illumos

- EulerOS 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7 and 8

- Inspur K-UX 2.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 5

- Inspur K-UX 3.0 , based on RedHat Enterprise Linux / RHEL 7

harladsinsteden 2 hours ago | parent

And does this have any actual impact on either the OS itself or its users?

curt15 2 hours ago | parent

If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality. UNIX(tm) is no longer so relevant compared to the early days of OS X, when Linux was still in its infancy and the Unix certification gave Apple street cred among developers. Most developers these days target Linux for production. That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.

steve1977 1 hour ago | parent

> That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.

Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.

mycall 1 hour ago | parent

SFU 1.0 and 2.0 relied on the MKS Toolkit by MKS/PTC, and SFU 3.0 later adopted the Interix (OpenNT) subsystem, which Microsoft acquired from Softway Systems in 1999.

The original POSIX Subsystem (psxss.exe) was Cutler's team who implemented a minimal POSIX.1 subsystem server alongside Win32 and OS/2. This was done primarily to satisfy US Federal Government procurement requirements (FIPS 151-2).

bitwize 1 hour ago | parent

Linux has been effectively Unix™ for me ever since the days when Dennis Ritchie indicated that he used Linux for everything on his web page. Late 2000s at the latest, maybe early 2000s. Unix enough for Dennis should be Unix enough for anyone.

jeremyjh 1 hour ago | parent

Caring about which systems are branded UNIX is like caring about which NBA player was paid to endorse a particular brand of athletic footwear.

dual_dingo 1 hour ago | parent

I've been using Linux for 30+ years now and have always considered it free (as in speech) Unix. For my purposes, the difference was always more legal and philosophical than practical. Of course, I was a student back then and didn't need to run the commercial software of the time.

pjmlp 55 minutes ago | parent

Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.

In these efforts they also tried to create successor languages to C, Alef and Limbo (for userspace), and never cared that much about anything past C89.

He has settled with Linux because that is the winner of UNIX wars, which predated Linux wars on Distrowatch.

As for the original UNIX,

"Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy"

-- Rob Pike

ununix 2 hours ago | parent

Who fing cares.

latexr 1 hour ago | parent

Intellectually curious people with even a mild interest in the history of computing.

Andrex 40 minutes ago | parent

Why even spend the time making an account to post such a comment.

People are so strange.

dofm 2 hours ago | parent

Tahoe was Unix 03 certified, and is still listed on that page if you filter by standard and choose Unix 03.

Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.

Amorymeltzer 1 hour ago | parent

Indeed. And, weirdly, there are items that show up by that 03 standard alongside macOS 26 (e.g. "HP-UX 11i V3 Release B.11.31") that also show on the front page. Is it a latest version kind of thing?

dofm 57 minutes ago | parent

Yea — said as much in another comment. That looks like it could be the rule — for example your HP-UX version there appears to be the latest, final HP-UX.

john_alan 38 minutes ago | parent

Yep linked page is active certification rather than historical.

microtherion 2 hours ago | parent

The certification was always a bit odd, applying only to a configuration nobody would run in practice: https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | parent

The whole UNIX certified thing is a bit odd to start with, but those addendums are really just saying that because the UNIX compliance tests are thoroughly stuck in the past, a bunch of security measures (that users expect to exist on modern systems) have to be disabled to run the test suite.

jeremyjh 1 hour ago | parent

SIP is not some irrelevant detail, nor is it an obviously good "modern security practice". A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.

jdiff 30 minutes ago | parent

The hardware owner can modify it all they want, disable SIP. For a large swath of average and non-average users that will not be modifying the closed-source OS they're running, it is obviously good.

Traditional UNIX is does not mean having an open source core you're intended to tinker with. Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary, connected with well-defined text-based interfaces. This is entirely orthogonal to user control and manipulation of the OS.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

Reminds me of (technically) POSIX compatible Windows.

saagarjha 1 hour ago | parent

The certification also was kind of bad at actually checking that the standard interfaces behaved as they should.

jonstewart 1 hour ago | parent

Xnu’s Not Unix!

crossroadsguy 1 hour ago | parent

I won't be surprised if you will have to boot into recovery, disable SIP, come back to user-space and run those unsafe 'ls' and 'cat' commands you were trying to live dangerously with on '~/Library', and then go back to recovery again to renable SIP to stay safe. You may also have to do that to install every software you want to install and use on your (is it?) mac other than the ones that are from companies that had tied up with and signed Apple's USA certificaiton (i.e User Safety Alliance™; involving non-publicly disclosed deals), or from the smaller devs who were not small enough and could pay a few thousand dollars annually and sent Apple 3 kidneys annually to publish softwares with very reduced scope and access on the device/OS. The data transfer between your mac and those app endpoints will be so protected that even your own self-destructive hands and insufficient intellect won't be able to gather what is happening beneath the Apple's hardware hardcoded encryption. All for safety beyond the UNIX way. So not all surprising.

post-it 1 hour ago | parent

Except you don't.

throawayonthe 1 hour ago | parent

oh no! security measures! scary!

spacedcowboy 46 minutes ago | parent

Is this “make shit up” day, or something ?

mococa 1 hour ago | parent

They used to marketing Mac OS X around Unix, but not anymore.

kccqzy 1 hour ago | parent

At that time they were trying to lure people from other Unixen such as Solaris for workstation use. Not any more.

mococa 1 hour ago | parent

Unix? What's this?

fmajid 1 hour ago | parent

Solaris as well, apparently

jeremyjh 1 hour ago | parent

It saddens me to think of all the CPU cycles spent on hosting online discussions that mention the fact that MacOS officially licenses the UNIX brand.

alberth 1 hour ago | parent

HN thread, 150+ comments:

The story behind macOS UNIX certification.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016

em-bee 58 minutes ago | parent

unix registry silently removed from relevance.

linux compatibility is way more relevant now.

throw0101a 56 minutes ago | parent

"Silently removed" meaning Apple probably did not bother going for certification of macOS 27.

And I'm not sure why it would be non-silently/loudly removed: is there an expectation of a press release or weblog post about non-certification?

pjmlp 50 minutes ago | parent

It is still there.

For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.

john_alan 39 minutes ago | parent

That’s historical. The linked page is active. Zzz

BoingBoomTschak 47 minutes ago | parent

It'd matter if this certification came with an extensive test suite guaranteeing some degree of compliance. Instead, you have macOS defaulting to an antediluvian bash as /bin/sh full of ridiculous bugs like this:

  $ cat test.sh
  var=
  echo "${var+{\}}"
  cat <<EOF
  ${var+\"foo\"}
  EOF
  $ /bin/sh test.sh
  {\}
  \"foo\"
  $ /bin/dash test.sh
  {}
  "foo"
Note that they even ship dash as a much better /bin/sh...

Nipola 14 minutes ago | parent

This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.