[HN Gopher] The story behind OS X's Unix compliant certification
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The story behind OS X's Unix compliant certification
Author : azinman2
Score : 429 points
Date : 2022-01-18 19:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quora.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quora.com)
| Lammy wrote:
| > The lawsuit was filed because the owner of Mac OS X Server kept
| putting "UNIX" on the web site, and all other marketing
| collateral for the Server product.
|
| Like https://youtu.be/nXJsS4B42_Q?t=750
|
| "First of all, [Mac OS X] is Unix-based, as you know. What you
| may not know is that Apple has become the #1 supplier of Unix in
| the world -- bigger than Sun; bigger than Linux; bigger than
| anyone! But we don't want to rest on that. We think we have one
| of the best versions of Unix out there -- Jagwire makes it even
| better with a whole bunch of cool new Unix things."
|
| As the OP implies (missing Tiger), Leopard was the first
| certified version: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/08/mac-
| os-x-leopard-rec...
| willis936 wrote:
| Doesn't linux stand for "linux is not unix"?
| reayn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you are getting confused with the GNU
| recursive acronym, which was supposed to stand for "GNU's Not
| Unix".
| willis936 wrote:
| To me it's a cheeky backronym-esque observation inspired by
| GNU. Another one I like is "Windows is not DOS".
| cassandratt wrote:
| I mean, Windows ran on DOS for a decade, so I'm not
| really seeing this one.
| addicted wrote:
| The problem is the backronym would be wrong.
|
| Linux is far closer to "Linus's Unix" (and that may
| actually be how it was named) than it would be to Linux
| is not Unix.
| alanh wrote:
| Recursive backronym: "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor"
| (originally "Personal Home Pages")
|
| I once suggested an alternative: "Powering Hypertext &
| Programs"
| (https://alanhogan.com/conversations/php/acronym)
| tzs wrote:
| An interesting backronym is Wine being "Wine Is Not an
| Emulator". That one has an interesting history.
|
| The original author first was going to call it winemu,
| but didn't like that. He shortened it to "wine", which
| led him to think of "whine" and "whinny". He liked
| "whine" but thought that was too long so "wine" it was.
|
| The first suggestion of "Wine is Not an Emulator" was in
| 1993, when there were concerns Microsoft might raise
| trademark objects to "Windows Emulator". No one took that
| name suggestion seriously.
|
| It wasn't until 1997 that it was adapted, as an
| alternative. In late 1997, the Wine FAQ said
|
| > The word Wine stands for one of two things: WINdows
| Emulator, or Wine Is Not an Emulator. Both are right. Use
| whichever one you like best.
|
| The shift to not mentioning it being a Windows emulator
| happened later. The release notes for 981108 said
|
| > This is release 981108 of Wine, the MS Windows
| emulator.
|
| and for 981211 said
|
| > This is release 981211 of Wine, a free implementation
| of Windows on Unix.
|
| As far as I've been able to glean from old Usenet posts,
| there were two reasons they stopped mentioning it being
| an emulator.
|
| 1. It could be used for more than just running Windows
| binaries under Unix. If you had source to a Windows
| program you could compile it on Unix and link it with
| Wine to give you a port of the Windows program. Wine was
| now a Windows compatibility system that included more
| than just an emulator. It was an emulator and a porting
| library.
|
| 2. Computers were getting fast enough that people were
| starting to run hardware emulators to do things like run
| game binaries from old consoles or old personal
| computers. Such emulators were not very fast. This might
| lead users to think that emulation was inherently slow,
| which might turn them off from trying Wine under the
| mistaken impression that it too would be slow.
|
| Wine, when used to run Windows binaries rather than as a
| library when porting, is in fact still an emulator just
| like it was when Bob Amstadt first wrote it. Nothing
| technical changed when they added the backronym, or
| changed the text for the 981211 release notes.
|
| But now we have plenty of people who have only ever seen
| the backronym, and the only emulators they have used that
| call themselves emulators have been emulating hardware,
| and so will insist that for something to be an emulator
| is must be emulating hardware.
| YokoZar wrote:
| Also note that these days Windows itself is an "emulator"
| in much the same way Wine is when running apps in the
| various compatibility modes for earlier Windows versions.
|
| Still, even today people tend to think of emulation as
| implying some sort of required slowdown. Unlike something
| like ARM or console emulation, most slowness in Wine has
| just been bugs rather than an inherent limitation of the
| concept.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I recall reveal years ago, I hung out in a forum where
| the users where very pendantic about claiming emulation
| only refers to hardware level emulation, like on an FPGA,
| and everything else was simulation.
|
| Interestingly, I've never heard that anywhere else since.
| astrange wrote:
| This reminds me of a hardcore Scheme fan I once knew who
| was really mad about JavaScript so he would only ever
| call it ECMAScript.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Hackers have _always_ been fond of pedantry:) It 's like
| how I got really annoyed by people calling the whole OS
| "Linux", so now I typically refer to "NT, Darwin, and
| GNU/Linux" out of sheer spite. (I'm aware that this is
| not helpful to anyone, and I do scale it to make sure
| everyone can still understand each other, but as personal
| flaws^wquirks go I think I'm doing just fine;])
| pram wrote:
| Oh I've run into this too, from trollish standards
| maximalists in the late 90s on IRC. They thought it was
| super hilarious to be overbearingly pedantic about W3C
| specs and such to random people.
| willis936 wrote:
| I've heard the opposite since the term software emulation
| has its roots in mimicking architectures in software but
| full blown virtualization simulates the entire system in
| software.
| amelius wrote:
| Could you expand the recursion a few iterations, and see if
| it makes sense?
| rzzzt wrote:
| GNU is "GNU is Not Unix"; unfortunately, it requires a left-
| recursive expansion that eventually exhausts the stack and
| terminates the process.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Me: just casually reading HN.
|
| Also me, to myself: hold our beer we're going to nerd snipe
| ourselves and write this as a regex that can't be flagged
| as ReDoS. /G(N)(U) is \1ot \2nix/
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| tooltower wrote:
| Which means the 'G' could have been replaced by _anything_!
| Same for the first 'P' in PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
| mehrdada wrote:
| PHP originated as Personal Home Page. The current
| official name is a backronym.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >PHP originated as Personal Home Page.
|
| I guess Worlds Most Efficient Security Violation
| Generator was tool long (WMESVG)
| cptcobalt wrote:
| A regressive opinion not representative of modern PHP.
| rovr138 wrote:
| No.
|
| >Linus Torvalds had wanted to call his invention Freax, a
| portmanteau of "free", "freak", and "x" (as an allusion to
| Unix). During the start of his work on the system, he stored
| the files under the name "Freax" for about half of a year.
| Torvalds had already considered the name "Linux", but
| initially dismissed it as too egotistical.[13]
|
| >In order to facilitate development, the files were uploaded
| to the FTP server (ftp.funet.fi) of FUNET in September 1991.
| Ari Lemmke at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), who
| was one of the volunteer administrators for the FTP server at
| the time, did not think that "Freax" was a good name. So, he
| named the project "Linux" on the server without consulting
| Torvalds.[13] Later, however, Torvalds consented to "Linux".
|
| >To demonstrate how the word "Linux" should be pronounced
| (['li:noks]), Torvalds included an audio guide (audio speaker
| iconlisten (help*info)) with the kernel source code.[16]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux#Naming
| rileymat2 wrote:
| When crossing languages shouldn't pronunciation change?
| msh wrote:
| For names I would say no.
| kergonath wrote:
| That does not work in general. Some sounds just do not
| exist in some languages. Also, for example a name can
| sound quite different pronounced with an Irish and a
| Yorkshire accent, and there are similar distinctions in
| most languages. Which one becomes the canonical
| prononciation then?
| int_19h wrote:
| The respectful way is to approximate it using the
| _phonemes_ available in the target language.
|
| But that doesn't mean using the rules that language uses
| to translate the _letters_ to phonemes! For example,
| English has a perfectly good sound for /i/ - so don't
| read foreign names with that sound in them as /ai/, just
| because the Latin spelling of said foreign name would be
| pronounced that way _if_ it were an English word.
| simiones wrote:
| I think that for proper names, it's common courtesy to
| try to prounounce someone's name as close as possible to
| the way they pronounce it themselves. This may be
| difficult when using sounds that simply don't exist in
| your language, and I'm not suggesting going as far as
| learning how to pronounce new consonants. But, if someone
| spells their name "St John" but introduces themselves as
| "Mr Sinjohn" (sIndZIn), it's common courtesy to refer to
| them as Mr "Sinjohn", not Mr "Saint John". Or, if their
| name is written as Xi (in Pinyin), but read as Shi, you
| should call them "Shi", not "Ksi", even though you may
| not be using the exact right "Sh" sound, and you will
| probably not be able to match the right pitch contour.
| mst wrote:
| Human language is one place where "comes as close as you
| reasonably can to following Postel's Law" seems to work
| out pretty well.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I kind of like when I go to a foreign county and people
| pronounce my name in a different way than I'm used to
| hearing it. Having them struggle to get it "right" just
| doesn't work anyway and makes them struggle needlessly.
| Even in my own country, there are two common ways to
| pronounce my last name and while I only use one way
| myself, I really don't mind when people use the other
| way.
|
| I named my son, "Alistair", and there seems to be a
| million ways people pronounce that. He doesn't seem to
| care either.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I'm already happy when people are able to copy/paste my
| name properly in an email. It seems 30% of the people
| aren't even able to do that.
| quicklime wrote:
| There are many cases where it does.
|
| For example if you say "Australia" in an Australian
| accent, Japanese people probably wouldn't understand. So
| you'd have to use the "correct" Japanese pronunciation:
| "oh-su-to-ra-ri-a".
|
| Another example is "Hyundai", which seems to have at
| least five different pronunciations. Apparently Koreans
| say "HYUN-day"[1], while the British say "high-UUN-digh",
| Americans say "HUN-day"[2] or something like "Han-die" in
| Spanish-speaking parts. Australians say "he-UN-day"[3].
| Note to prescriptivists that this is how Hyundai's
| various subsidiaries say it in ads.
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-
| monitor-25813198
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI3-fJlmnoM&t=50s
|
| [3]: https://youtu.be/RyupLuOVny0?t=15
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Linus never said "this is how Linux should be
| pronounced". He only said "I pronounce Linux as 'Linux'".
| badRNG wrote:
| I also pronounce Linux as "Linux."
| blowski wrote:
| Pronunciation changes even when crossing accents, let
| alone languages. The prescriptivists will say there is a
| correct pronunciation, and any deviation from it is
| wrong. But the descriptivists will ask why it matters if
| we all understand that we're referring to the same thing.
| It's an age-old debate.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I find it amusing that Linus himself pronounces both with
| the same vowel sounds, indicating that obviously the
| kernel is named for its creator.
|
| While my American cohorts refuse to use the same vowels,
| choosing "Lie" for the first syllable of the man's name,
| and "Lih" for the first syllable of the kernel. Then
| berate me for following the pattern but using US English
| pronunciation rules.
|
| But you guys know what I'm talking about, so just shut up
| and let's get on with this deployment, mmk?
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| * insert oxford comma debate/every grammer debate ever*
| xyzwave wrote:
| Ironically, given the thread, XNU stands for "X is not Unix".
| jeffwass wrote:
| There is an embedded OS called Xinu which does stand for
| "Xinu is not Unix", and also happens to be Unix spelled
| backwards.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinu
| pram wrote:
| The MacOS kernel is in fact called XNU, which means what
| you think.
| mehrdada wrote:
| XNU, the Darwin kernel, is not a recursive acronym like
| GNU. Officially stands for _X is Not Unix_.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Before Macworld NY 2002 the "Sends other UNIX boxes to
| /dev/null" ad was already running in national magazines.
| kccqzy wrote:
| One thing I've wondered is that since Apple claimed UNIX
| compatibility for Tiger and earlier without passing the
| certification, could the lawsuit have still proceeded but seek
| damages for previous versions of Mac OS X? Imagine damages like
| "give us a percentage of all revenue made from selling Mac OS X
| Tiger and earlier".
| pdpi wrote:
| The article hints at the answer - the Open Group wanted to
| stay relevant, and certification for OSX was a good way to do
| that, so they weren't too interested in ruffling Apple's
| feathers.
| bluedino wrote:
| How would it have been $200 million to remove the UNIX logo from
| the marketing materials?
| lionkor wrote:
| a 200 million lawsuit plus removing the unix stuff
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Am I doing the math right? If he got $10M in stock in 2005, that
| is worth approximately $1.3B now?
| sgerenser wrote:
| If you look up thread there's posts where he indicated he never
| got the stock he was promised.
| masklinn wrote:
| As other comments noted, he (and his team) apparently got
| shafted.
| znpy wrote:
| Classic Apple
| bitigchi wrote:
| It's pleasant to hear that lots of FOSS software benefited from
| this effort.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| > _We bought begrudging buy-in from Mike Smith (yes,_ that* Mike
| Smith) by having him rewrite the file locking code.*
|
| Anyone know who is that Mike Smith?
| drewg123 wrote:
| I suspect its the Mike Smith who was a FreeBSD committer and
| core team member 20-ish years ago.
| ksec wrote:
| This? [1] May be worth its own HN submission. But that mail,
| 20 years ago reads to me the problem with today's open source
| aren't that much different to now.
|
| [1] https://freebsd-hackers.freebsd.narkive.com/lvvHQibV/it-
| s-no...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Wow, $10 million in Apple stock...
|
| Reading this, I feel like I've done things that were this big...
| or a decent fraction of it... and never got so much as a thank
| you
| kevan wrote:
| Anyone have insight on whether this level of performance
| incentive compensation was more or less common 20 years ago
| than now and how to credibly negotiate for them as an employee
| instead of leaving and contracting on value pricing? I'm afraid
| the answer is "if you have to ask..." Is it mostly just
| executives or are high level ICs ever successful here? In the
| public arena I only really hear about it happening for
| strategic acquihires and execs.
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| I have a reasonable amount of respect for Terry's technical
| competence, but a ... quirk of his personality is that he
| doesn't really respect the bounds around the truth.
|
| If you know those bounds, you can filter him, but in general
| reading / listening to Terry is necessarily an active and
| selective process.
|
| It's fair to say that some of the things he describes in this
| piece are true; he names some real people, and talks about
| some things that actually happened, but the tale as presented
| is more "inspired by" than "faithful to" the truth and many
| of the details are pure invention.
|
| One thing that _is_ true is that some of the folks he names -
| and praises - did indeed work _extremely_ hard for much less
| recognition than they deserved.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Sounds like he didn't get it: https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-
| Jobs-a-better-employer-from-...
| Jedd wrote:
| I think this may be a more relevant link to the 'I didn't get
| paid' - and explains a little more of the veiled threats to
| whomever Simon Patience is from your link.
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-is-work-life-balance-at-Apple
| ralfd wrote:
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-patience-4b2103b9
|
| Apple Vice President Core OS Software (2002-2014)
| [deleted]
| xtracto wrote:
| Wow that speaks so bad of apple.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| We weren't there, we don't actually know what was
| promised.
| fyrabanks wrote:
| I'm extremely curious about the "untimely death trigger
| conditions" part at the end...
| viktorcode wrote:
| As I understand it he got $10m equivalent of cash, but not
| $10m of actual stock that would have grown tremendously.
| phonon wrote:
| Why wouldn't he just buy the $10m of Apple stock then?
| mariojv wrote:
| Couldn't he have bought Apple stock with the proceeds?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Oh wow. What a blow. The way I make myself feel better about
| all the stocks and options I was never offered in my career
| is by assuming something like that would have happened to me.
| ralfd wrote:
| Archive / mirror:
|
| https://archive.fo/iWgqx
| puffoflogic wrote:
| It is interesting how much weight the author puts on bypassing
| process and bureaucracy to the success of the project.
| olliej wrote:
| I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug
| priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor"
| bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable
| response.
|
| Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they
| will have many restrictions on _any_ changes going in,
| including feature work from their own team, let alone some
| random potentially behavior changing ones.
|
| Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things
| happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require
| a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even
| if making tests is hard.
|
| There have been a few times where I have spent longer
| (sometimes _way_ longer) building the infrastructure to make a
| test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In
| the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the
| time there 's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular
| case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently
| important that they might want to bypass such.
| microtherion wrote:
| Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change
| another team's header files, nor force them to make a
| particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it
| would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many
| different projects.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on
| large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's
| includes were routine.
| microtherion wrote:
| What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know
| practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways
| of organizing work.
|
| Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large
| scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long
| period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if
| your large scale projects had similar concerns.
| astrange wrote:
| It's also true that projects with strict rules about what
| each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch
| of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can
| be like this too.
| weatherlight wrote:
| He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in
| my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those
| with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the
| authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible
| in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when
| they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent.
|
| This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who
| wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.
| weatherlight wrote:
| I find people will go with the flow and basically follow
| orders. Most people won't shake the boat.
| coldtea wrote:
| Most people?
|
| (Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more
| like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in
| general).
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept
| authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack
| own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have
| a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what
| the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense
| to you.
|
| To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people
| interact with other people. Social rules? Those that
| "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost
| and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it
| would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes
| sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?...
|
| Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed
| limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if
| nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be
| legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid,
| but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for
| changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal
| consequences - it's about the principle. But total
| abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at
| its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help
| people break that law should there be a need for it.
| Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society,
| sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully
| respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and
| sometimes the other way around.
|
| To be honest, I have no idea where the line between
| "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist"
| actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I
| guess.
|
| When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my
| parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making
| me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without
| telling me why. I think they were interpreting my
| questions as undermining their authority, which
| ironically made them less likely to actually answer me,
| but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I
| would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that
| it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a
| hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually
| decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to
| work in a field where I generally don't have to do things
| that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have
| been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents
| were warning me about back then ;)).
|
| Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I
| don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority
| personality trait".
| BurningPenguin wrote:
| Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds
| familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only
| mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as
| an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.
| Lammy wrote:
| > It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of
| salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority
| when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or
| incompetent.
|
| Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify
| this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit
| of course
| https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-
| bet...
| saagarjha wrote:
| > But it was a red letter day when the header files passed
| testing, and we celebrated by going out to IL6 -- the informal
| name for the BJ's restaurant, just off the Apple campus.
|
| IL7, I thought? IL6 is an existing building at the southernmost
| end of the campus.
| olliej wrote:
| IL7, I'm guessing typo, or they've escaped for long enough to
| forget exact details :D
| cperciva wrote:
| Did IL6 exist at the time? I'm guessing the informal name is
| just "the building after the ones which actually exist".
| saagarjha wrote:
| I think so?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Did IL6 exist at the time?_
|
| It did, so I'm guessing it was just a mistake. I recall
| Pepper Mill/BJ's being referred to as either "R&D 7" or "IL
| 7".
|
| > _I 'm guessing the informal name is just "the building
| after the ones which actually exist"._
|
| Yep!
| donavanm wrote:
| Concur. I had also always heard of it as "IL7" when I
| worked in IL1 & 6. An aside, the balcony & gamesroom in IL2
| was a nice little escape for an afternoon beverage as well.
| Hayvok wrote:
| BJs is indeed referred to as IL7 and the restaurant even had an
| official-looking "IL7" placard on the rear entrance.
|
| Hate to nit-pick the story at all though, it's a great. Stories
| like this floated all around Apple, and I stopped being
| surprised by them after awhile. That level of focus, drive, and
| accomplishment by just a handful of engineers was in the
| company's bones.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > By this time, I knew pretty much every one of the 13 million
| lines of kernel code in the Mac OS X kernel.
|
| narcissism overload; stopped reading there
| coldtea wrote:
| Interesting part:
|
| > We had a lot of gratitude in the Open Source community --
| particular for our fixes to make bash pass the tests. You have
| absolutely no idea how much Apple contributed to the Open Source
| community, as part of this project, because it was a secret
| project -- at least to people outside Apple -- so we didn't
| advertise the fact. But I expect we contributed about two million
| lines of code, to hundreds of Open Source projects, over the
| course of that year. A lot of gratitude -- but it wasn't
| collective, and so Apple was still faulted for "using Open Source
| code, but never contributing back". We fixed at least 15 major
| gcc bugs, for example. You have no idea.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I suspect this (Apple employees contributing individually) is
| still often the case. Apple is all over the place on their
| general attitude towards open source, but they're notoriously
| extremely secretive. About almost everything that isn't in a
| press release, curated announcement or publication, or required
| by law. Loudly proclaiming their investment in open source,
| without some corresponding PR goal, is essentially free tea
| leaves for people to speculate about What They're Building In
| There.
|
| I'm likewise sure there are some handshake agreements between
| many open source maintainers and Apple-paid contributors to
| just... not spill those beans.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Apple chose the secrecy culture. It's also their problem if
| their contributions are so secretive that they have a PR
| problem about not enough OSS contributions.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the
| line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high
| level, ever again, in the future.
|
| I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately
| missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Normally it wouldn't. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a
| camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long
| held grudges that fundamentally fractured business
| relationships (eg IIRC Nvidia being permanently banned from
| Apple platforms for early announcing something, and similar
| reaction to integrating ZFS being announced early). Guy was an
| asshole, but he was an extraordinarily powerful asshole.
| eigen wrote:
| > IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms
| for early announcing something
|
| may also be the major issues with their chipset.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254
| smoldesu wrote:
| It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as
| far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using
| cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to
| heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused
| the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even
| reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic
| boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much
| confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a
| manufacturing one.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| "Soldergate" impacted _all_ vendors that shipped nVIDIA
| chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap"
| solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free
| solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS
| directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have
| much experience with the stuff back then and chose a
| solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive
| thermal stress.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.
| [deleted]
| giobox wrote:
| The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of
| chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are
| specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple.
|
| This is why every single NVidia customer during this
| period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up
| making several large compensation payments to several big
| vendors such as HP too etc.
|
| Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big
| a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop
| industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as
| tech media termed it at the time that Apple's
| relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not.
|
| > https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-
| understan...
|
| As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I
| can't agree. There was an entire settled class action
| lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all
| affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid
| web.archive.org, but you can still find the details:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvi
| dia...
| masklinn wrote:
| Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years.
|
| However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and
| extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the
| calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for
| keynotes -- you can also see how things broke down as soon
| as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs'
| death).
|
| Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with
| extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always
| done, and it's entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get
| very cross about a supplier fucking that up.
|
| [0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been
| extremely compartmentalised -- at least under Jobs; go
| check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of
| that where you'd just see colleagues disappear into unknown
| voids and HIG went full SCP
| threeseed wrote:
| > Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with
| extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always
| done, and it's entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get
| very cross about a supplier fucking that up.
|
| I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who
| accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets
| to the website a few days before the launch. It was
| discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a
| flurry of meetings to fix it.
|
| The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never
| received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs.
|
| I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really
| surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions
| based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially
| back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.
| amelius wrote:
| > Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised
|
| Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such
| great products because of the tight integration that
| would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a
| hardware and software company.
| threeseed wrote:
| Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low
| level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive
| project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company.
|
| But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth
| firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware
| teams as you would expect.
| chronogram wrote:
| Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I
| think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler
| generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a
| Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro
| which was nice!
| giobox wrote:
| Nvidia still offered the "unofficial" official driver for
| a long time that let you run unsupported GPUs in Mac Pros
| or Hackintoshes for quite a while. I ran a couple of
| Maxwell generation NVidia parts this way, even though
| macOS out of the box didn't support them, Keppler wasn't
| the last that worked.
|
| The only downside back then was when a new macOS release
| hit, you would have to wait for Nvidia to release the
| updated third party driver. IIRC there was one major OS
| ten release I was stuck waiting a few months before the
| driver landed. This extended the lifespan of a lot of Mac
| Pros greatly!
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective
| asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It's not often
| they continue to hold much power as a corpse.
| digisign wrote:
| Still ten minutes to edit the post.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Meh, I'd rather walk my pup and eat dinner. If people are
| curious they'll find it
| astrange wrote:
| Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful
| (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially
| because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are
| evil.
|
| Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren't banned
| from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.
| [deleted]
| jen20 wrote:
| At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further,
| it didn't need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL
| license - ships with macOS to this day.
| chungy wrote:
| Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound
| to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple
| demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary
| component, Sun might've actually gone with it.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation
| market. They had everything to gain from making Unix
| mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and
| pretty much nothing to lose.
| 4ad wrote:
| FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was
| removed only _after_ Oracle bought Sun.
|
| Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.
|
| Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best
| buddies.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.
|
| I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his
| dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks,
| are incredibly hard to kill.
|
| I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he
| wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.
| swills wrote:
| I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the
| motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your
| defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective
| Takata air bag.
| bitwize wrote:
| Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on
| the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly
| he fucked up, just to spite him.
|
| "You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in
| Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the
| wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to
| discharge fleeting grudges.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > how badly he fucked up
|
| I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go
| but not quite make it, is it?
|
| And why would every company in the industry even listen to a
| rant from Steve Jobs?
| fyrabanks wrote:
| > I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good
| go but not quite make it, is it?
|
| If I understand correctly,in this particular situation,
| fucking up would cost Apple at least $200M--so it had to be
| a total success for him.
| smashed wrote:
| I'd put the initial fuck-up on Apple marketing, who used
| the UNIX trademark without license nor compatibily.
|
| This was an attempt to repair the damage that had already
| been done, by passing the UNIX compliance required to
| become an official, paid, licensee.
| nikanj wrote:
| In bigcorps, marketing can freely make false claims, and
| engineering is on the hook for delivery.
|
| You are technically correct that this was a sales fuckup,
| but the shit storm would 100% be directed towards the
| "underperforming, delivery-target missing" programmers.
| lwkl wrote:
| Isn't this a good example of engineering and management
| working together to make changes over multiple
| departments?
|
| The engineers got time to asses if the project was
| feasible and what kind of support they need. Management
| fully supported them and made the other departments play
| ball and they made allies in other departments that
| helped them making the changes necessary.
|
| They were asked if they could do a job and given the time
| and ressources to asses the situation. If they had any
| doubts they could've said no and let the legal department
| take over.
| acdha wrote:
| That'd depend on exactly how bad the screwup was but Steve
| Jobs was notoriously unforgiving if you made a promise and
| didn't have a good reason for missing it. That might not
| have been the case here, since they clearly slipped it due
| to the Intel transition, but if he was in an unforgiving
| mood or someone else was looking for a scapegoat, remember
| this example of how closed the community was at the time:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
| switch/wp/2014/04/23...
| bitwize wrote:
| > I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good
| go but not quite make it, is it?
|
| If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a
| good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its
| goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits,
| in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on
| you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a
| good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO
| consider you someone to count on again?
|
| > And why would every company in the industry even listen
| to a rant from Steve Jobs?
|
| Because he built this industry.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave
| it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss
| its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or
| lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up.
|
| Are you under the impression that for example lawyers are
| fired every time they lose a case and a company has to
| pay out?
| coldtea wrote:
| I think the "Steve Jobs" part is just a random assumption
| from the parent.
|
| More likely he'd have problem being hired at that level
| simply because he would be associated with a major failed
| project, Jobs or no Jobs.
| rasz wrote:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s
| tor...
|
| "OK, I've seen enough, " Steve interrupted me. "It's
| great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac.
| Congratulations."
|
| But then he paused, and stared at me for a moment with an
| incredibly intense gaze, as if he was sizing me up or
| maybe just trying to scare me.
|
| "But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation.
| I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple."
|
| "What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.
|
| "There's no way that you could have written that program
| without confidential information that you learned by
| working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge
| whatever you like for it."
|
| I started to get angry. "The program is only half
| finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I
| won't be motivated to finish it."
|
| Steve gave me another intense stare as he paused for a
| few seconds. Then he stated a single number, without
| explanation.
|
| "One hundred thousand dollars."
|
| "I don't know," I told him, "I think it's probably worth
| a lot more than that."
|
| "Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."
|
| I didn't seem to have any alternative but to capitulate
| to Steve's price setting,
|
| there are better Steve stories on that site, mostly about
| abuse and psychological manipulation.
| coldtea wrote:
| Which proves and is related to the story how?
| rurban wrote:
| > "I entered Steve's office with a bit of trepidation,
| because I thought that Switcher was worth at least a
| quarter of a million dollars to Apple, but I was sure
| that Steve would never want to pay me that much. But I
| was also proud of Switcher, and was interested in seeing
| how Steve would react to it."
|
| The previous paragraph
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Not every company would, but the CEOs of the major tech
| companies that a guy with Terry's impact would have
| probably liked to work at? I'd buy it. Those guys talked
| all the time, and I doubt they were gonna let one hire get
| in the way of a major corporate relationship.
| howinteresting wrote:
| Between that and his ":)" response to the Google recruiter
| getting fired because they were unaware of the collusion
| going on between Apple and Google, he will go down as one of
| the worst, most abusive tech barons in history.
| coldtea wrote:
| I think he has already gone down in tech history, and it
| wasn't as "one of the worst, most abusive tech barons".
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an
| insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the
| case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant
| interactions with him.
|
| My personal favorite of the early Apple stories was the
| one where Jean-Louis Gassee saw him park his big dumb
| Mercedes in a disabled parking spot and said "I never
| realized those spaces were for the emotionally
| handicapped" [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macint
| osh&stor...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Pretty sure he 's widely acknowledged as a guy who was
| an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in
| the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of
| unpleasant interactions with him._
|
| Yes, we have anecdotes (plus all the other nice things
| people said about him, including his daughter in her book
| and the author of TFA elsewhere in Quora).
|
| Those are not what he is remembered about though, but for
| building one of the biggest companies on Earth (at times,
| the biggest), plus doing it twice in his 20s and in his
| 40s, while also building two other companies (one worth
| billions for its movies, the other sold to his first
| company for half a billion), plus defining several modern
| consumer tech markets and/or phenomena.
|
| And of course, there are far far worse employers than a
| demanding jerk (abusers, rapists, racists, thieves, even
| murderous CEOs and founders) - and with less saving
| graces and nowhere near the same results.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| He was also remembered as being hired as a line engineer
| at Atari early on in his career who by all accounts would
| have been fired almost immediately if it hadn't been for
| Wozniak doing a lot of his work for him.
|
| Entrepreneur most definitely, engineer... not so much.
| bigbizisverywyz wrote:
| But even then, probably still a better engineer than many
| people who are smugly declaring that he wasn't a good
| engineer.
|
| After all, he was hired by Atari, and got parts delivered
| to him personally by Bill Hewlett and an internship at HP
| as he was a young electronics enthusiast.
|
| Of course if he's being compared to Wozniak, well
| different league.
| arvindamirtaa wrote:
| Well...when you put it like that...
| caycep wrote:
| Also, at least per a lot of his defenders, most (maybe
| not all ) of the anecdotes were pre-NeXT Steve vs post-
| NeXT Steve...albeit who knows what to believe...
| Taniwha wrote:
| I was around Apple pre Next and people there were already
| afraid of Steve
| howinteresting wrote:
| Unfortunately so, to the extent that this is true.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It's never been a thing in Silicon Valley. This sounds like
| someone misunderstanding or inflating the stakes.
| threeseed wrote:
| I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was still there and it
| definitely sounds odd.
|
| I had never heard of project-based profit sharing or being
| fired and named/shamed for non-delivery. I had personally
| seen coding mistakes cost tens of millions in lost revenue
| and the developers were still there and many got promoted.
|
| Surely if he was promised $10 million and Apple didn't pay
| up there would be grounds for a lawsuit. Especially since
| that stock would be worth so much more today.
| imwally wrote:
| A list of certified UNIX operating systems:
| https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/
| vmlinuz wrote:
| I'm quite surprised to see that OpenServer is still on that
| list, and Solaris _isn 't_...
| manbart wrote:
| I think that IBM z/OS is the strangest entry on the list.
| It's also notable that Hawaii EulerOS is a Linux distro based
| on CentOS
| pjmlp wrote:
| Thanks z/OS UNIX System Services.
|
| https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.5.0?topic=descriptions-
| zos...
| azinman2 wrote:
| So Huawei got Unix certification for Linux? If so, that's a
| pretty big deal!
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| They did, but (IIRC, and this is an _old_ memory) to make
| GNU /Linux pass certification you have to hack it up
| quite a bit; lots of GNU tools have POSIX modes that
| significantly change how they behave - things like du
| defaulting to 1024-byte units by default but using
| 512-byte units if you set POSIXLY_CORRECT because parts
| of the standard are, um, "interesting". But yes, neat to
| know that it can be done.
| krylon wrote:
| AFAIR, Red Hat once had a version of their system
| certified, too. But it's not as useful as one might think
| - the certification applies to a specific distro and
| release only, so it needs to be renewed with every new
| release.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Extra funny considering that Solaris is built from actual
| AT&T UNIX(tm) code and OpenServer was, last I looked, FreeBSD
| with some patches.
|
| (Or, honestly, sad; RIP Sun.)
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Depends on the version of OpenServer. Up to 6 (released in
| 2005) it was a descendant of Xenix, so plenty of AT&T (well
| Bell Labs I guess) code still in there probably.
|
| Later on SCO finally died and Xinuos got the trademark,
| which was reused for a FreeBSD-derived product as well
| throw0101a wrote:
| I think this is less technical and more 'political' /
| contractual, as it used to be:
|
| > _This is to certify that Oracle Corporation has entered
| into a Trademark License Agreement with X /Open Company
| Limited in accordance with which the following are registered
| under the X/Open Brand Program._
|
| * https://web.archive.org/web/20191022053203/https://www.open
| g...
|
| * https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3642.htm
|
| An August 2018 tweet:
|
| > _We are pleased to announce that Oracle Corporation has
| achieved certification to the UNIX V7 Product Standard for:
| Oracle Solaris 11.4 Operating System and later on SPARC-based
| and X86 based platforms. For more
| information:http://ow.ly/8fT830lBjfu #UNIX_
|
| * https://twitter.com/theopengroup/status/1034785507610447872
|
| There's a renewal process:
|
| * https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/docs/UNIXV7_Certificati
| o...
|
| Oracle did not bother renewing in April 2019:
|
| > _Solaris supports SPARC and x86-64 workstations and servers
| from Oracle and other vendors. Solaris was registered as
| compliant with UNIX 03 until 29 April 2019.[6][7][8]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Solaris
| mrweasel wrote:
| It's honestly a little weird that Oracle doesn't see the
| value in continuing to have Solaris certified, same with
| Redhat and RHEL, but Apple continue to get macOS certified.
| mst wrote:
| At this point Solaris is a zombie product that's only still
| on sale to bring in revenue from people who're so committed
| to the platform they'll buy it no matter what.
|
| The development team was basically disbanded a while back,
| and the hardware team even further back than that, and any
| customer who's not going to be put off by that seems fairly
| unlikely to be put off by the lack of certification.
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