UNIX or not?

[fanf]

http://www.google.com/search?q=apple+%22open+group%22+unix+trademark

Unsurprisingly, given Apple's marketing of OSX and its lack of UNIX certification, the Open Group (keepers of the UNIX trademark) sued Apple for trademark infringement at the beginning of 2002. The most recent news that I can find about this argument was April 2004, at which point the parties were still in dispute with two months left before the court's deadline.

However TOG were making conciliatory noises, and given that Apple is now the largest UNIX vendor it would have been foolish of them to go to court. If Apple won, it would have been bad for TOG and UNIX certification, and worrying for the status of UNIX standardization. However it would have been good for UNIX and Linux marketing because it would allow market analysts to group them together where they belong, ahead of Windows.

So what happened? Anyone know?

Comments

[knell.livejournal.com]

I think it would have been pretty stupid of TOG to push this case all the way through the courts, as a) everyone loves Apple in this Microsoft-dominated world, and b) nobody really gives a toss what the Open Group say about what's UNIX and what's not anyway. In reality people who care about these things will usually make their own minds up about what's UNIXish and what's not, and MacOS X is pretty damn UNIXish (while remaining pretty damn NeXTish on the side). After all, there are certain other operating systems which are even closer to fitting TOG's idea of what's true UNIX but which can't be referred to as such for trademark reasons, and this leads only to irritating circumlocutions like "UNIX-like operating system".

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

Ok, so a very belated comment, but...

So I accept that Linux is not suppsoed to be described as UNIX, but I've never been able to bring myself to say that FreeBSD is not UNIX. I mean, BSD was UNIX, what exactly happened to it to deunixify it such that modern BSDs aren't UNIX?

I've not really thought about OS X in this context, but I guess since it's BSD, it's UNIX in my book...

[owdbetts.livejournal.com]

Or to put it another way:

OS X is FreeBSD. FreeBSD is BSD UNIX. BSD UNIX is UNIX. Q.E.D.