GNU is owned by the Free Software Foundation. BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is based on code licensed by AT&T to the University of California and has been the property of the University of California Regents. The Unified Specification ends the bifurcation of UNIX by joining the AT&T and BSD forks of the OS.Ĭlick to expand.AT&T does not now own UNIX and has not done so for more than a decade. Beginning with MacOS X 10.5, MacOS X has been a certified port of the UNIX 03 Unified Specification. Up through MacOS X 10.4 Tiger, MacOS X was a POSIX-compatible port of BSD. The standard is maintained by The Open Group, not by a Apple or any other hardware manufacturer.

UNIX 03 is supported by Apple (MacOS X 10.5, MacOS X 10.6), Fujitsu (Solaris 10), HP (HP-UX 11i), IBM (AIX 5L, AIX 6), and Oracle (Solaris 10, Solaris 11).

Now that Darwin is certified UNIX 03, it is no more proprietary than it ever was. GNU, the project most noted for Linux, supported Darwin with its own GNU-Darwin distribution. Apple created its own port and released it as opensource under the name Darwin. However, MacOS X was built on a combination of opensource ports of BSD-primarily NetBSD and FreeBSD. Without a doubt, there are proprietary ports of Unix. The notion that Unix is proprietary is misinformed. GNU was developed with the intent of developing a Unix-workalike OS without using a line of AT&T code.

GNU is a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. To be clear, Linux is only the kernel of the GNU operating system. The Unified Specification ends the bifurcation of UNIX by joining the AT&T and BSD forks of the OS.

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