Making Mac OS X Unix Compliant Certified
Terry Lambert (via Gus Mueller, Hacker News):
I was the tech lead at Apple for making Mac OS X pass UNIX certification, and it was done to get Apple out of a $200M lawsuit filed by The Open Group, for use of the UNIX™ trademark in advertising.
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We were promised 1/10th of the $200 million, or $20 million in stock, on completion. $10 million to me, $5 million to Ed, and $5 million to Karen Crippes, who was looking for a home in Mac OS X development[…]
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Eventually, we had everything working and passing the tests. We were ready to pull the trigger.
And then they pulled in the Intel code changes, and crapped all over everything, because we were told to wait two weeks.
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All told, probably 4% of the 6% of the Max OS X kernel that I wrote? […] IT came from committing massive signals changes, and attributing them to a simple signal bug resulting in a kernel crash, in the “Radar” bugs database.
A lot of the things Ed did to libc header files, and libc itself, had similar “fibs” in Radar.
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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”.
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The executive who agreed to the deal left his wife for an HR person, and took the stock for himself.
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[…] 众所周知，macOS（更早时候叫Mac OS X和OS X）是一个通过了UNIX认证的操作系统。但你清楚早年Apple为了通过这个认证所做的工作吗？曾经领导这项任务的Apple员工回忆了当年的经历：为了满足要求，大量系统库和头文件被更新，导致几乎整个系统的软件（包括iTunes）都要重新构建，他们甚至重写了4%的内核代码，还贡献了若干开源项目。为何要如此大费周章？因为Apple在宣传中用到了UNIX商标，如果OS X没有通过UNIX认证，他们可能就会输掉官司并赔偿两亿美元！ […]
