The certification was always a bit odd, applying only to a configuration nobody would run in practice: https://www.osnews.com/story/141633/apples-macos-unix-certif...
If true, a better title would be "macOS is no longer UNIX certified".
If this is an intentional move, Apple is just acknowledging reality. UNIX(tm) is no longer so relevant compared to the early days of OS X, when Linux was still in its infancy and the Unix certification gave Apple street cred among developers. Most developers these days target Linux for production. That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.
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> That's why Microsoft developed WSL, not WSU.
Developed WSL and discontinued SFU (Windows Services for UNIX), which they had since NT 4 days.
SFU 1.0 and 2.0 relied on the MKS Toolkit by MKS/PTC, and SFU 3.0 later adopted the Interix (OpenNT) subsystem, which Microsoft acquired from Softway Systems in 1999.
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).
Sure, I just hope macOS doesn't end up doing some custom thing rather than staying Unix/Linux like, which we've had with macOS/OS X till now.
Linux has been effectively Unix™ for me ever since the days when Dennis Ritchie indicated that he used Linux for everything on his web page. Late 2000s at the latest, maybe early 2000s. Unix enough for Dennis should be Unix enough for anyone.
Well he and others moved away from UNIX, created Plan 9 and Inferno.
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
I've been using Linux for 30+ years now and have always considered it free (as in speech) Unix. For my purposes, the difference was always more legal and philosophical than practical. Of course, I was a student back then and didn't need to run the commercial software of the time.
Caring about which systems are branded UNIX is like caring about which NBA player was paid to endorse a particular brand of athletic footwear.
Tahoe was Unix 03 certified, and is still listed on that page if you filter by standard and choose Unix 03.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't yet passed certification.
I swear I've seen these "[Latest macOS release] does not appear in UNIX certification site" threads every year since the release of Big Sur in 2020.
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.
Indeed. And, weirdly, there are items that show up by that 03 standard alongside macOS 26 (e.g. "HP-UX 11i V3 Release B.11.31") that also show on the front page. Is it a latest version kind of thing?
Yea — said as much in another comment. That looks like it could be the rule — for example your HP-UX version there appears to be the latest, final HP-UX.
Yep linked page is active certification rather than historical.
I won't be surprised if you will have to boot into recovery, disable SIP, come back to user-space and run those unsafe 'ls' and 'cat' commands you were trying to live dangerously with on '~/Library', and then go back to recovery again to renable SIP to stay safe. You may also have to do that to install every software you want to install and use on your (is it?) mac other than the ones that are from companies that had tied up with and signed Apple's USA certificaiton (i.e User Safety Alliance™; involving non-publicly disclosed deals), or from the smaller devs who were not small enough and could pay a few thousand dollars annually and sent Apple 3 kidneys annually to publish softwares with very reduced scope and access on the device/OS. The data transfer between your mac and those app endpoints will be so protected that even your own self-destructive hands and insufficient intellect won't be able to gather what is happening beneath the Apple's hardware hardcoded encryption. All for safety beyond the UNIX way. So not all surprising.
Is this “make shit up” day, or something ?
oh no! security measures! scary!
They are, when used against the user.
Except you don't.
Perhaps Apple decided to get out of the way and let IBM and SCO duke it out on that page ;-)
It is still there.
For those that don't know how to use a filter drop down, check UNIX 03 version.
That’s historical. The linked page is active. Zzz
I see macOS 26 listed under the Unix 03 standard. Was macOS 27 listed and then removed? The submission title + site contents combined do not give enough info to assess what exactly was silently removed.
macOS was listed on the main register (the link in this submission).
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.
The index page seems to only list the status of current OS versions.
Perhaps Golden Gate simply hasn't passed certification yet? It's less than a month old.
The this is much ado about nothing. Every single entry on the page you linked goes to its product page with the exact Unix standard it is certified as. Once you select a filter, you cannot get back to unfiltered list without the back button on the browser.
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.
Well Unix as a standard is completely dead. macOS as a Unix is completely dead. I expect another branch in the already complicated as hell tree of Unixes.
macOS as Unix is not dead – the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).
The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades.
We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier.
Linux doesn't have an "architecture".
All of our production Linux systems are running on Graviton these days, i.e. they’re arm64.
Indeed.
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.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.
I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models.
The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps.
Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS.
And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux.
I bet you are located in US.
You’re in a bubble. Windows is still huge, especially in middling companies that dictate it and standard HP/Dell/Lenovo hardware for all 3k staff.
It’s insanely common.
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.
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.
> Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux.
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.
Microsoft just shipped a full-fledged first class Linux container runtime as part of Windows[1]. I don’t think it even made front page of HN, which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment, but it is absolutely something Apple should be offering as a first class capability on OS X. The compatibility of the host OS file system with being mounted into docker images makes it a better environment for running such things.
[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2026/09/29/wsl-co...
Well… that’s handy.
Game and app developers certainly not.
In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.
I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style.
Of course they were, even NeXTSTEP was designed to be compatible with UNIX only to compete with UNIX workstations like those from Sun.
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.
Its called colima and its excellent.
I haven't tried it. colima also simplifies linux VMs which is more of an analog to WSL2 than just running containers. It has really nice integration with Incus as well, if you like persistent system containers.
would be awesome
It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on.
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.
What would that going away look like?
yeah I guess there isn't really much to move to... a new custom Kernel and Userspace? extremely unlikely - I guess it's here to stay, despite not being formally Unix.
Swift on Mach
I never quite understood what the point of this was beyond marketing. Linux is also not listed probably because no one ever paid to have it listed
Apparently it was for legal reasons. Apple was sued by the Open Group for describing Mac OS X as Unix® so they decided it was cheaper to bring it up to spec rather than to fight the lawsuit.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27095/why...
https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
Enterpise espeically banking need standard and certification for reliability thats why , also certain Linux distro had certified before from China based on RHEL.
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
Enterprise. Checklists.
It is specific Linux distributions that would be Unix-certified. Huawei had one; not sure if it has ever been on this page.
It was a legal problem, and an interesting story: https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...
And Gnu’s Not UNIX.
It would be marvelous to see GNU/Linux certified as a UNIX specifically with rms’s preferred GNU/Linux as the name.
They could even just call it GNU is now UNIX.
It was Stallman who came up with the name POSIX by the way.
IIRC there were some UNIX Linux distributions in the past but the certification wasn’t renewed
HN thread, 150+ comments:
The story behind macOS UNIX certification.
When you're small, you need the certificates and badges others give you to be seen and be validated. I really don't think anyone needs to become familiar with Apple or macOS and that any of these certificates now matter a tiny amount to a multi trillion dollar corporation.
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 see windows as the biggest pile of trash in the world.
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
Usage and quality are not particularly correlated, though.
Better for both sides. They clearly have different visions for what an OS should do.
What? The Open Group has no vision for what an OS should do, it simply writes standards describing what implementations are already doing.
"Silently removed" meaning Apple probably did not bother going for certification of macOS 27.
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?
It could be that macOS 27 never got Unix certified. Wayback Machine on Oct 7th only shows macOS 26 being Unix certified.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261007103902/https://www.openg...
27 wasn’t certified and 26 was listed but is now removed.
From that Wayback page, it looks like only one version of macOS is certified at any one time: the latest version. Since macOS Golden Gate was only recently released, perhaps it's a process blip and we'll see Golden Gate listed soon.
It saddens me to think of all the CPU cycles spent on hosting online discussions that mention the fact that MacOS officially licenses the UNIX brand.
I could see this being corporate incompetence or a genuine deviation. I wonder which one it is.
And does this have any actual impact on either the OS itself or its users?
well not specifically, but directionally could mean less adherence to a UNIX like environment.
This is inevitable, there is no escaping it.
Solaris as well, apparently
They used to marketing Mac OS X around Unix, but not anymore.
At that time they were trying to lure people from other Unixen such as Solaris for workstation use. Not any more.
Unix? What's this?
unix registry silently removed from relevance.
linux compatibility is way more relevant now.
It now looks like a museum of obsolete operating systems.
It'd matter if this certification came with an extensive test suite guaranteeing some degree of compliance. Instead, you have macOS defaulting to an antediluvian bash as /bin/sh full of ridiculous bugs like this:
$ cat test.sh
var=
echo "${var+{\}}"
cat <<EOF
${var+\"foo\"}
EOF
$ /bin/sh test.sh
{\}
\"foo\"
$ /bin/dash test.sh
{}
"foo"
These days it defaults to zsh instead of bash. The shipped bash is ancient due to (I believe) being last version released as GPL-2.0.
Xnu’s Not Unix!
Who is running Xinu today?
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Who fing cares.
Why even spend the time making an account to post such a comment.
People are so strange.
Intellectually curious people with even a mild interest in the history of computing.
Intellectually prudent people may note that macOS's status as "Unix" depended on temporary waivers and insane, unattainable OS modifications.
There's probably a high-nines percentage of Mac owners that have never configured their Mac to be Unix compliant, and never will.
The certification documents read like the world's most abstruse bar trivia quiz...
"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 certification also was kind of bad at actually checking that the standard interfaces behaved as they should.
Reminds me of (technically) POSIX compatible Windows.
The whole UNIX certified thing is a bit odd to start with, but those addendums are really just saying that because the UNIX compliance tests are thoroughly stuck in the past, a bunch of security measures (that users expect to exist on modern systems) have to be disabled to run the test suite.
SIP is not some irrelevant detail, nor is it an obviously good "modern security practice". A system that the hardware owner cannot modify is not really on the same wavelength as traditional UNIX.
The hardware owner can modify it all they want, disable SIP. For a large swath of average and non-average users that will not be modifying the closed-source OS they're running, it is obviously good.
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.
Traditional UNIX was entirely proprietary, with source you're intended to tinker with.
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.