Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_trapper | Hacker News Reader

It's not usually seen that way because the BSDs are considered to be directly descended from the original UNIX codebase and GNU and Linux are clones.

View on HN

The analogy isn't used correctly : BSD was initially a codebase clone of UNIX, in other words, BSD is a fork.

GNU/Linux was initially developed from scratch to behave like UNIX to a certain extent (hence the name "Unix-like"). In other words, it's a rewrite inspired from a model.

UNIX is a trademark, so you may not call something UNIX unless you are allowed to use that trademark (which costs several 100k USDs to get certified). Apple paid that price for macOS, so (certain versions of) macOS are UNIX.

macOS has a marketshare in server market segment of around 0% (client of around 5%, iOS substantial though), and Linux is the defacto standard in that area. Which OS do people learn nowadays? Linux distributions. So it makes sense to see it from that PoV. Because chances are that you're going to use that defacto standard. And even if you prefer UNIX(tm) or BSD or Solaris you'd rather use Linux than Windows or OpenVMS. Cause the latter are aliens from outer space.

As a purely technical note, there is a Linux which is a UNIX: Inspur K-UX.

More philosophically, insisting on a definition of UNIX which includes z/OS and excludes Seventh Edition Unix isn't going to win you many friends.

http://www.opengroup.org/csq/repository/norationale=1&norefe...

And speaking of aliens from outer space, z/OS is a JCL-eating Martian speaking EBCDIC through its virtual cardpunch. ;)

We've written about certified UNIX wrt macOS vs. Linux here - https://github.com/shlomif/Freenode-programming-channel-FAQ/... .

Aliens have something to teach us. The current OS monoculture is not conducive to innovation.

"BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com