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...

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.

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.

This is fine and I hope it's permanent. Unix certification never really captured what once made "OS X is a Unix" attractive or exciting to many.

What I care about, at least, are experiences of ease, convenience, compatibility, control, order, and freedom around a programmable system that invites the blurring of the lines between user and developer, between quotidian use and automation, and between decoration and reshaping. Such experiences still involve many of the same elements as they did two decades ago: a composable language of commands, commonly observed conventions, well-organized hierarchies of files, formal software freedom, powerful package management systems, great in-band/offline documentation, etc. But Unix certification isn't the center of gravity around which such experiences revolve, if it ever was. And for that matter, neither is macOS.

Tahoe:

https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm

I imagine that the cert will be listed for Golden Gate soon.

"silently" doesn't occur in the title, so is clickbait drama editorializing.

It is still there.

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

Why is the client OS important?

We just ssh/http to the real Linux machine that runs our things anyway. These days with commoditized VPN and symmetric residential Gigabit internet, that Linux box does not have to be in the cloud either (specially with LLMs guiding the sysadmin tasks).

Any thin client with a browser, an ssh client and an internet connection will do the job.

While it may simply acknowledge reality, I’ve already moved my main development off macOS to a NixOS workstation months ago. Too much friction in an OS that is clearly trying to be more “consumer” than “creative” at this point.

Which is a damn shame, because AI dev is going to result in a massive influx of new software right when Apple makes it ever more difficult to do so on its platform.

I still make Mac builds, but it is more of an afterthought on a secondary Mac build machine now.

You know something has peaked when they become less open and more “clawbacky”; that is basically collecting interest on an investment (marketshare) instead of remaining more open (at the cost of some things). “Increased security” is always the rationale.

MacOS 26 is still listed: https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm

Was it delisted from a different “product standard”, or is this submission about macOS 27 not being listed?

I didn't realize macOS was actually certified UNIX since 2007, thought it was just marketing.

Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?

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.

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.

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

HN thread, 150+ comments:

The story behind macOS UNIX certification.

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

Why would anyone care about what the Open Group has to say in this day and age? Is anyone actually still using SCO or AIX any more?

It appears here https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm

Maybe it’s time to come out with a new standard that supersedes POSIX and Unix cert?

Standards are useful and the fact that these have lasted this long is IMHO evidence of that

Perhaps Apple decided to get out of the way and let IBM and SCO duke it out on that page ;-)

The registry of remaining products is a list of irrelevant operating systems hardly anyone uses anymore.

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...

"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?

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

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

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

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.

unix registry silently removed from relevance.

linux compatibility is way more relevant now.

Solaris as well, apparently

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

This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.

This doesn't mean anything. The official Unix registry is completely irrelevant to the modern world. Nobody uses OSX pretending it's compatible with Solaris. Like Microsoft, Apple only cared about this certification because it used to be a checkbox on certain government procurement tenders.

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?

How is SCO still a thing?

It now looks like a museum of obsolete operating systems.

Xnu’s Not Unix!

[flagged]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

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...

In many ways, macOS is kind of driving towards irrelevance.

Apple wants it to be more like iOS (so they can control what you do on it) while users want a normal computer they can do computer things on without it spewing ads or applying political pressure when someone tries to hold Apple accountable (e.g. the EU trying to make Apple stop abusing their market position).

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.