View this article at: http://dev.macnn.com/articles/07/08/02/leopard.unix.certified
Thursday, Aug 02, 2007 3:45am

Mac OS X Leopard receives U...

Apple's Mac OS X Leopard has received the stamp of approval as an official unix operating system. The official UNIX 03 certification, which entitled the company to use the Unix brand,d came from the Open Group thanks in part to the efforts of Apple's OS boss Kevin Van Vechten and his team and puts Mac OS X Leopard alongside the Big Three: Sun, IBM, and HP, according to Infoworld. The certification for the delayed operating system came in mid-May, but was only recently publicized. A publicly available document certifies that "Apple 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: UNIX 03, Registration P1190; Mac OS X Version 10.5 Leopard on Intel-based Macintosh Computers."

The Open Brand is the internationally accepted guarantee of conformance to recognized standards, elevating Apple's status to a tier-one Unix operating system. "Mac users, realize that qualifying for UNIX is no small feat, especially for an open source, BSD-based OS," Infoworld's Tom Yager wrote. According to the report, the UNIX 03 specifications cover libraries, system calls, terminal interfaces, commands and utilities, internationalization and the C language.

The certification means that Leopard, which was delayed until October as Apple diverted resources to iPhone development, conforms to the Single UNIX Specification Version 3 (SUS), which defines how components such as the command shell, the compiler, and C APIs should function.