Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.
It takes several months for the certification to appear on the site. What would be newsworthy is if we see a release next year without this release getting certification.
Looking now, I see almost no uses of the word UNIX on the website except the docs archive, so I guess they’ve decided to abandon both the certification and the use of the UNIX trademark in macOS.
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
Today? It's all Linux or Windows (of course, now also Web/SaaS). All these different Unices have fallen by the wayside in favor of Linux. Yes, some are still around but the mindshare has been in Linux for the last 20 years.
I suspect you could rip out a ton of autoconf rules and no one would notice.
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.
https://www.opengroup.org//openbrand/register/xy.htm
I imagine that the cert will be listed for Golden Gate soon.
Also the suggestion Apple was entirely removed is false; see https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm
For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.
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.
If the platform I use is an afterthought for you then your software becomes afterthought for me as well.
Was it delisted from a different “product standard”, or is this submission about macOS 27 not being listed?
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.
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.
Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
> Is this Apple just not wanting to pay for the certification anymore or does it actually change anything for us devs?
It's probably not about paying and more about tiny differences. Will it change anything for you? Almost certainly not. In fact, it might make things better for you. If anything, Apple's adherence to the UNIX spec can sometimes mean subtle differences in tools between macOS and BSD/Linux. Do you want things like grep or sed that conform to the UNIX spec or that work like grep and sed work in the real world?
And these differences are often small edge cases that don't come up much, but a spec is a spec.
The money is inconsequential for Apple, but at this point it probably makes more sense to just stop calling it UNIX and not worry about shipping a version of a tool exactly meets the UNIX spec - it'd be more useful for their users if it matched the behavior on Linux/BSD.
That grep/sed difference on mac caused me issues so many times, always thought it was just Apple doing their own thing. I didn't realize it was a spec thing.
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIX® - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIX® compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIX® and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIX® specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIX® and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIX® compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the ® everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIX® or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIX®" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.
In practice, anyone seriously developing Linux software on either macOS or Windows is using VMs or containers running the actual Linux kernel, at least for testing, and the difference is that Microsoft has put far more effort into integrating specific support for these things into the OS.
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.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
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.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
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.
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.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
You might wanna look into that because that’s not how it works at all. I frequently switch between terminal and GUI apps and have not once noticed Finder failing to catch up with whatever it is I’m doing in the terminal.
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.
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.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
More than 1 Linux distributions have been tested, passed, and listed in the past... But you need to pay again every year, and recertify every new version, and they didn't bother keeping it up.
I described them and what this meant in some depth in this 2023 article:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2023/01/17/unix-is-dead...
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.
They were CentOS Linux derivatives.
At best a distro could be certified. But that certification would not automatically extend to other distros.
Standards are useful and the fact that these have lasted this long is IMHO evidence of that
https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...
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?
linux compatibility is way more relevant now.
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?
I mean I don't disagree with that, but you're in dire need of a reality check wrt Apple's dominance
It's not even the most used OS. It's userbase has certainly grown over the last 20 years, but it's still at <30% on desktop...
There are however some demographics in which it's more represented, and that's probably just such a bubble where you're coming from
And if you're honest, macOS has sadly dropped in quality too...
But the reason why I wrote my comment was just that you gave off the feeling that you consider macOS to be the only relevant desktop operating system, which seemed like a very strange view to have given the reality of it's userbase.
People are so strange.
$ cat test.sh
var=
echo "${var+{\}}"
cat <<EOF
${var+\"foo\"}
EOF
$ /bin/sh test.sh
{\}
\"foo\"
$ /bin/dash test.sh
{}
"foo"
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).
You mean the second most used desktop OS with about 15% of the global consumer OS market? About 30% of consumer desktops in the US alone? That “irrelevant” macOS?
(*) My lawyers have asked me to point out that the case of Regina vs Sex Pistols (1977) established that this term refers to a priest in Old English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Mind_the_Bollocks,_Here%...).
When it's about the fruit company, is there a difference? Unless it's for the eyes of the beholden i.e., le iFans.
So, if you want your installation of macOS 15.0 to pass the UNIX® 03 certification test suites, you need to disable System Integrity Protection, enable the root account, enable core file generation, disable timeout coalescing, mount any APFS partitions with the strictatime option, format your APFS partitions case-sensitive (by default, APFS is case-insensitive, so you’ll need to reinstall), disable Spotlight, copy the binaries uucp, uuname, uustat, and uux from /usr/bin to /usr/local/bin and the binaries uucico and uuxqt from /usr/sbin to /usr/local/bin, set the setuid bit on all of these binaries, add /usr/local/bin to your PATH before /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, enable the uucp service, and handle the mystery issues listed in the four Temporary Waivers.
Then, and only then, is your macOS 15.0 actually UNIX® 03-certified.
This is batshit insane. I can guarantee you with 100% certainly not a single macOS installation in the entire history of macOS – let alone when just counting macOS 15.0 – has implemented even half of these changes. I’m sure there is a small number of people who have System Integrity Protection disabled permanently, and an even smaller number of people who have enabled the root account, and an even smaller number of people who have done both of those things – but that’s it. All the other changes are far too obscure and specific to be of any use to anyone.
"1.12 Threads
1.12.1 Cancellation Points
Question 31: Which C stdio functions have cancellation points that occur when a thread is executing?"
https://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/noreferences=1&RID=...
- The Linux kernel also has timer coalescing
- Linux also has lazy atime ('relatime') by default
- No Linux distro installs uucp by default, and certainly not suid
- Desktop distros will also run a file indexer of some sort
etc.
They were:
Inspur K-UX (expired on 3 February 2019)
Huawei EulerOS (expired in September 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
These were both based on Red Hat.
So legally at one point a Linux was Unix.
the netbsd gallery (https://netbsd.org/gallery/) had a picture of somebody using that on windows xp (iirc) in order to compile pkgsrc packages in a "posix compliant" environment. the picture seem to be gone now :(
Btw, MacOS 27 (the current version) still has UUCP.
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.
SIP is as much defense from the likes of Adobe and Google as it is from more traditional malware.
I think that piece by piece Apple wants to go into direction of making macOS just a desktop version of iOS, that is closed and impossible to modify. They will use of course security as an excuse, the practical thing is that with iOS they succeeded because they went to the market with an OS that was already closed, but making users accept that in new version downloading a software from the internet and installing it it's no longer possible takes time. But they are getting there soon to me.
AT&T was forbidden by its consent decree from productizing Unix. Licensees received the source code, on an as-is basis, with no official support from AT&T.
It doesn't mean end users had access to the source code.
In fact, vendors would have been prohibited from distributing AT&T source code to customers who weren't themselves AT&T licensees, just as CSRG was prohibited from distributing BSD to customers who weren't licensees before 4.4BSD-Lite.
The same goes for most other proprietary source-available products. For example, game developers can't open source Unreal Engine projects even though Unreal Engine source licenses are available to end users for free.
At a bare minimum, you would almost have to have source to the vast majority of the kernel because there was no kernel modules. Sysgenning for a particular system involved compiling the kernel for that set of hardware.
I'm literally working on an early sun system emulator right now, heavily assisted by the standard sec tape that came with the standard software distribution of sunos, which has plenty of AT&T code.
As a non corporation end user with a sublicense from one of the above licensees (which is the apt analogy for an individual user in my opinion) you most certainly did not receive the source or have the rights to it.