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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

  > The primary commercial Unix implementation is nowadays Oracle Solaris.

Surely it's macOS? The total install base of Solaris must be a rounding error compared to the number of Macbooks sold daily.

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Note that most of this text is from at least 2012 (check the wiki history, which starts in 2013 with an indication that this is an import of existing content).

Previous recent discussion on that specific quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30929464

"Commercial Unix" was a defacto phrase used by places like Gartner and IDG that meant the crop of things like AIX, HPUX, Solaris, and so on. It always excluded Linux and MacOS.

Google for phrases like "idg unix shipments solaris" and you'll see some of the context from that time period.

MacOS X was paid software until about 10 years ago

It still is. It's just bundled with the hardware, and always has been. What changed is that upgrades used to cost money, and now don't. You know it's an upgrade because you aren't allowed to install it on anything that didn't ship with MacOS X out of the factory.

Taken in combination, the two words "Commercial Unix" historically refer to Unix from Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM or SGI. They are not a reference to all variants of Unix that are sold.

I'm not saying it's a technically correct term, just what it did historically mean.

By that metric, it will be Android. The total install base of Macbooks is a rounding error compared to the number of Android phones. (>3 billion)

I don't think Android is an officially licensed version of UNIX though? (I wouldn't normally nitpick, but I assumed that's what was meant by "commercial UNIX".)

I don't get it. Isn't Darwin open source ?

macOS as of Leopard is “certified UNIX” (Single Unix Specv3). Darwin is the “Unix core” that macOS is built on, but it hasn’t been certified by itself[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

Darwin is just a bunch of source code dumps at this point. Gone are the days when Apple provided an actual bootable ISO.

Did they ever?

yes, approximately until 10.4 Tiger: https://web.archive.org/web/20100303160410/http://www.openso...

(importantly those links still work, even outside of the Wayback machine)

Thanks for that!

Neither is Solaris at this point. Oracle no longer renew their Unix certification for Solaris. Apple still has macOS certified though.

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

Ten years ago, Solaris was still a certified "UNIX" system.

Android is Linux, not Unix. Linux shares no code with Unixs.

Solaris, BSD, Darwin all share code.

Linux is POSIX compatible and userspace is similar, but the kernel is distinct.

Darwin possibly shares still the few files identified from infamous Unix wars lawsuits, but it doesn't really share code with Solaris (which is System V)

It’s POSIX conforming but nobody, no distribution, has ponied up the money or taken the time to do the conformance testing necessary to get branded as UNIX. Additionally, it sounds like this testing would have to happen with every new release.

Why spend all that money and time when Linux has so dominated the certified Unices for some time?

Huawei EulerOS is a UNIX-certified Linux distribution.

> Huawei EulerOS is a UNIX-certified Linux distribution.

Looked it up, here's the page for the OS: https://developer.huaweicloud.com/ict/en/site-euleros/eulero...

And here's a news post about the certification: https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2016/9/huawei-kunlun-euleros-...

> [Shanghai, China, September 9, 2016] Today Huawei announced that its EulerOS 2.0 operating system for its KunLun mission critical servers has earned UNIX 03 certification from The Open Group. This means that Huawei EulerOS 2.0 has been officially certified as a UNIX system.

Linux is a kernel, so it can't be a Unix.

Inspur K-UX, on the other hand, is a Linux distribution which is a Unix

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX

> Inspur K-UX 2.0 and 3.0 for x86-64 were officially certified as UNIX systems by The Open Group.

[snip]

> Inspur K-UX 2.0 was one of six commercial operating systems that have versions certified to The Open Group UNIX 03 standard (the others being macOS, Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, and EulerOS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

> Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX,[35] EulerOS,[36] HP-UX,[37] Inspur K-UX,[38] IRIX,[39] macOS,[40] Solaris,[41] Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1),[42] and z/OS.[43] Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant.[44][45]

None of the Open Source BSDs are on that list.

Isn’t android a fork of the Linux kernel wrapped in a whole lot of Java? It unquestionably dominates its market, smart phones and it’s-a-laptop-and-definitely-not-a-netbook kind of devices, but even as a Linux variant, it seems very much in its own little world. Not the most popular commercial Unix implementation so much as the most popular OS ever, that also happens to be more Linux-like rather than Unix-like.

Its primary interface with user/developer is indeed JVM based languages. However, Android is more than that. It is a capability-based microkernel-like OS implementation on top of Linux. Everything in Android goes through IPC. Every process is heavily isolated using SELinux and permissions including drivers.

Nope, Android userspace has zero traces of UNIX, and its use of the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.

Zero? Bionic is derived from BSD libc, which surely has continuity back to Unix.

Only the ISO C standard library is part of the public API for Android apps, use anything else at the peril of having the app crash across devices or being killed by Android security measures that prevent access to private APIs.

EDIT: To make it more explicit, given that people keep mistaking Android for Linux,

"NDK C library"

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis#c_libra...

"Improving Stability with Private C/C++ Symbol Restrictions in Android N"

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/improving-...

"Android changes for NDK developers"

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/android-ch...

The Android ISO C standard library is derived from the BSD libc, which is derived from the UNIX libc, so there's clear evidence of UNIX in Android userland.

Android isn't Unix. It's Linux. Linux is "Unix-like" but it's not Unix.

"GNU's Not Unix!"

Android isn't unix. It has a Linux kernel (which may or may not be unix, a combustible discussion I'd rather avoid), but the user space is definitely not.

Solaris is a SysV Unix, whereas macOS is a BSD, not sure they were thinking of that distinction. Anyhow, when you’re talking about mounting /usr from the network, it’s safe to assume server workloads where macOS is simply nonexistent.

System V and BSD are both considered "UNIX", in that they descend directly from the original AT&T UNIX (v6).

In some senses macOS is more of a UNIX than Solaris is, as it is certified by The Open Group and Solaris is currently not: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

It would absolutely be MacOS but I don't think that's what they mean by commercial Unix implementation really

But what do they mean by that phrase then?

I think a lot of people who think "macOS isn't Unix" (or similarly, "z/OS isn't Unix") aren't aware of the legal status of the term "Unix" – that it is a registered trademark owned by The Open Group, and legally a trademark means whatever the trademark owner says it means – and The Open Group is very clear that "Unix" means any system, irrespective of its marketing or heritage or other functions, which passes their test suites and whose vendor pays the licensing fee.

> But what do they mean by that phrase then?

The phrase means Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM and SGI variants of Unix.

But why those and not others?

And does “IBM… variants of Unix” include z/OS? If not, why not?

You don't say, so can I just buy MacOS to install on my own hardware?

macOS does its own thing with filesystem layouts so is not relevant to this discussion, surely?

And by extension iOS, which is also Darwin.

MacOS is a commercial OS that happens to have a Unix substrate, but does not tend to show it too much. The Unix part is an implementation detail. much like the CPU architecture. It is not marketed as a Unix workstation, much like Android phones are not marketed as Linux handhelds.

Unless I’m mistaken I believe Apple at least used to market it as UNIX?

Yup. "Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" https://www.brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf

Fun fact, this is from the times when macOS (Mac OS X back then) wasn't Unix compliant, and it caused a $200mn lawsuit.

HN thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29984016

And for a couple of years after they sorted out the compliance, they really pushed UNIX in their advertising materials. After all, they paid more than $20mn to sort out compliance.

Apple has macOS registered by the Open Group as UNIX 03 compliant. You can hardly be more Unix than that.

> The Unix part is an implementation detail.

UNIX is a certification. macOS is certified. Solaris is not and hasn't been since 2020.

> MacOS is a commercial OS that happens to have a Unix substrate

I am not sure what you’re implying. There always have been a lot of UNIXes that were “commercial OS”. Historically, the free branches of the UNIX family tree have been way out-numbered by commercial distributions.

> but does not tend to show it too much

That does not really matter (besides the fact that the terminal has always been there). The fact that there is a GUI shell on top does not change the architecture of the OS.

> The Unix part is an implementation detail.

These days, UNIX is a certification. Otherwise it refers to the architecture and origins of the OS, from the initial AT&T UNIX. The only purity test is the certification.

> It is not marketed as a Unix workstation, much like Android phones are not marketed as Linux handhelds.

How it is marketed and what it actually is are orthogonal concepts. It is UNIX, whether this annoys some people or not.

MacOS is a certified UNIX, and Android phones cannot be marketed as Linux handhelds, because there is zeo Linux on their Java, Kotlin, ISO C and ISO C++ userspace for app developers.

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