MacPorts design (curiosity)

[Richard L. Hamilton]

On Oct 6, 2011, at 1:39 PM, William H. Magill wrote:

> 
> And just for the record, Apple is a member of The Open Group, and conforms to the Open Group standards and APIs. (Snow Leopard was certified in 2009.)
>          http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3581.htm
> 


Since the time Novell gave the Unix trademark to X/Open (which joined Open Group, itself the merger of OSF and UI), the trademark was tied to having applied (and presumably paid) and tested for compliance to the spec.  Prior to that time, the trademark applied where the owner said it did, but was generally understood to be meaningful for a code lineage.  So nowadays, anything that pays and passes the test can be called Unix, but that wasn't the original understanding of the term.

OS X qualifies on both scores, although IIRC Apple claimed it was real Unix prior to actually having jumped through the hoops, which they did take care of later…and I think they might be weak or missing some of the optional stuff in the spec.