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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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"
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.
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).
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
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.
For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.
And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.
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.
It’s insanely common.
Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment
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.
The remaining differences are related more to systems stuff - managing daemons with launchd for example. These aren't really a distraction day-to-day.
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.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
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.
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.
https://colima.run/
https://github.com/apple/container
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.
The story behind macOS UNIX certification.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016
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.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.
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.
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?
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
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
It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...
linux compatibility is way more relevant now.
People are so strange.