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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

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.

"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.

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