When you're small, you need the certificates and badges others give you to be seen and be validated. I really don't think anyone needs to become familiar with Apple or macOS and that any of these certificates now matter a tiny amount to a multi trillion dollar corporation.

Given the amount and volume of software that mac has, the fact that almost all new interesting stuff are released for mac first or even mac alone, I also don't think it needs to attach itself to bigger names for platforms.

I think the financial burden of Ubuntu Mobile, Unity 8, and Mir; and the immediate rise of docker and WSL made canonical fully shift to server, so much so that their website no longer is about a better os for people, but what can it do for your cloud. Other distros also followed its path and Linus became all in on servers and IoT. I see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world. Infinitely inconsistent, buggy, patched worked, visionless and rotting. Honestly that is one piece of software that is worse that AI slop.

And so what is there for Apple to compete with honestly? Haiku? Solaris?

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

It is still there.

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

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.

It now looks like a museum of obsolete operating systems.

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.

HN thread, 150+ comments:

The story behind macOS UNIX certification.

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

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

"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?

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

This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.

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.

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...

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

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

Solaris as well, apparently

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

unix registry silently removed from relevance.

linux compatibility is way more relevant now.

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...

Xnu’s Not Unix!

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).

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.