Not being an enterprise IT guy, this story went a little past me, but it's apparently big news to some. With Leopard, Apple has now joined Sun, IBM, and HP as the only four OS vendors to achieve UNIX 03 certification. This is significant because it opens up some interesting possibilities for Apple in enterprise applications once XServes with Leopard Server ship (presumably in October). It's likely that third-party UNIX enterprise software vendors will now be more willing to write for (or port to) OS X. Further, as the InfoWorld article notes, this will make it possible to code for the Mac and easily port "to RISC big iron" just by recompiling. I suspect this will also make a lot of folks in academia happy as well.[via Digg]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-01-2007 @ 7:21PM
Francis said...
While I was looking at this the other day, I noticed that the Intel version of 10.5 got the UNIX 03 certification and not the PPC version, unless Apple don't really care if the PPC version of the OS gets UNIX 03 because... who wants to port apps. to a 'dead' platform? - isn't that what Apple told companies like Adobe or something, but I may have my wires crossed...
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8-02-2007 @ 4:51AM
Mo said...
It costs a lot of money to get that certification, and testing's performed against a specific hardware platform; certifying Leopard on PPC just doesn't make much business sense.
It's possible that, due to slight differences in implementation between the two platforms, Leopard/PPC was submitted but didn't pass, but we'll probably never know.
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10-26-2007 @ 6:37PM
Enzo said...
Leopard has changed from "ps -aux" to "ps -ef" Must be due to this certification. BSD style was always ps-aux but that doesn't exist in Leopard. Check it out.
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