[geeks] Google announces Google Chrome OS

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, wa2egp at att.net wrote:

> From: Robert Brooke Gravitt <gravitt at gmail.com>
>>
>> On Jul 8, 2009, at 9:16 PM, wa2egp at att.net wrote:
>>
>>> IIRC from the latest ad I scanned a few minutes ago, it said Mac OS
>>> was BASED
>>> on UNIX.
>>> (emphasis mine)
>>>
>>> Bob
>>
>> No, it was certified as UNIX by the Open Group and is allowed to use
>> the trademark. IIRC, this discussion has crept up a few times on this
>> list; there's considerable debate here as to what constitutes UNIX.
>>
>> Brooke
>
> That may be true but the way the ad read, I really didn't say is WAS
> UNIX but, "Mac OS X is built on a rock-solid UNIX foundation to make
> it resistant to attacks from malicious programs." so interpreted that
> as based on UNIX.  Maybe it's just a matter of symantics.

Yeah, I'd say symantics.  I might go so far as to call BS on that
one, as there is no UNIX [TM] source code in the system, as far as I
know, it's an updated Mach kernel (CMU?) with bits from the BSDs and
customizations from Apple.  It was submitted to the OpenGroup for
certification, and was granted a UNIX 3.0 stamp of approval.  So, 'based
on' seems like the wrong wording for them to be using, IMO, as I would
tend to interpret that as to mean that they started with something that
was already UNIX, then modified it to their purposes.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org