| gabriel rosenkoetter on Thu, 17 Oct 2002 11:58:13 -0400 |
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On Thu, Oct 17, 2002 at 11:41:34AM -0400, William H. Magill wrote: > BSD derivatives are NOT branded Unix. [BSD Unix was, but "BSD Unix" is > no longer existent.] > > You will notice that Wind River's BSD/OS does NOT call itself Unix. > The same is true of NetBSD and FreeBSD. And OpenBSD describes itself > > "The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based > UNIX-like operating system." > > The reason for this is that Unix branding is a process and a licensing > situation. It guarantees that the Operating system involved conforms to > a large list of standards, and that it has been tested for that > conformance by X/Open. ::sigh:: It means that it confomrs to X/Open's definition of Unix, which is a pretty lousy one. Too bad they own the copyright. Calling something a "real Unix", to me, means it derived from original Unix sources (all of those OSes did) and matches the current POSIX and SuS standards.[1] You don't pay X/Open for standards authentication, you pay them for the right to use a name. It's POSIX you pay for a standard. Last I checked, BSD/OS did that; the other three didn't. But it's been a while. [1] Btw, GNU/Linux can do the second, but it can never do the first. And it'll also never do the second as long as it relies on GNU utilities... various things about GNU utilities are basically incompatible with POSIX. Notably, tar. -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
pgpc2mlbvrMjj.pgp
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