[Sussex] UC!

[Geoff Teale]

On Tuesday 08 July 2003 7:32, Steve Dobson wrote:
> What out here, this is dangerous.  The Open Group, the trademark holders of
> "Unix",
> don't like statements like "Linux is like Unix", in fact I seam to recall
> that they
> are taking Apple to court over Apple's use of the term "Unix".
>
> It is much safer (the Open Group can't do anything about it) is to say the
> "Unix is
> like Linux".

Mmmm, yes.  Linux is an implementation of a Unix like operating system, this 
much we know for sure.  

Whether it _is_ actually Unix or not is a more difficult question.   
(Unless you believe SCO,) Linux doesn't contain any of the actual Unix code, 
but it does contain a lot of it's concepts (structurally it is deliberatly 
almost exactly a Unix clone).  However, this in itself is not necessarily 
enough to call it Unix, many OS that are definitely not Unix are very close - 
BeOS, QNX, etc... even, in some respects, Windows (certainly DOS was inspired 
by Unix, even if it was a legendarily poor implementation).

So the difficulty here is what defines something as actually being Unix - is 
there a clear definition?

Most people agree that *BSD are Unix, yet since the court case in the early 
1990's they, like Linux, share no source code with AT&T's offspring.

What about Mach (the core of Apple Mac OS X)?  Certainly it was always 
referred to as "a microkernel Unix" when I was a lad (and all this were 
fields, yer know)  - but know people are doubting Apple's claims that Darwin 
(which is a combination of the Mach kernel and FreeBSD libraries) is Unix.

Linux on the other hand is, as RMS insists, and implementation of the GNU 
System running on a Linux kernel, and as we all know GNU's Not Unix!

On the other hand - if I address the older IT professionals on this list, why 
did you first get into Linux?  I'll bet for a lot of you it's because it 
meant you could have Unix on your home machines and you could get your hands 
dirty in it.

So when is a Unix not a Unix - every third wednesday and on bank holidays, as 
near as I can tell.

-- 
GJT
Free Software Foundation
tealeg at member.fsf.org