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Originally Posted by
dodona
its true that MacOS is more "unix-like' than Linux because of UNIX certification. On the other hand totally unrelated Z/OS, BS2000 and other proprietary mainframe OS'ses also have posix certification. That's it and that's all either.
That's all it means.
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MacOS has nothing to do with the classic UNIX approach of free and open
The culture is not UNIX culture, it's BSD and GNU. The entire "classic UNIX approach of free and open" was anti-UNIX backlash! A little history is needed to understand why.
- Until "recently", UNIX was a monolithic copyright and licensed software hoarded by AT&T.
- Richard Stallman disliked the closed binary approach and began GNU to create a portable, compatible, open UNIX alternative.
- BSD, in modern parlance, was an open, pre-AT&T "fork" of UNIX, in pure sourcecode form. "Binary source distribution" in short.
- Linux was a madcap project out of nowhere which got so popular that GNU adopted it over their HURD kernel.
The modern meaning of UNIX has changed. It's now a paper standard and series of tests of describing the languages, API's, programs, and shells that must be available for an operating system to call itself UNIX. Certification is not free. The standards need upkeep paid for somehow.
So, open and closed systems can both be UNIX, the same way different brands of appliances use the same wall sockets. And the standard means that one UNIX system can run the same software as a completely different UNIX system, given source code and a little work.