New International Standard: ISO/IEC 9945:2002

An anonymous reader writes "ISO/IEC and The Open Group announce international approval of the joint revision to POSIX® and the Single UNIX® Specification. More info here."

Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems with standards is the fact that they cost too damn much especially for free or open software users. I usually try to collect the last publicly available draft or copy that was used for voting and do my work with that. This has worked pretty well the the IEEE 802 standards and the SCSI and FireWire standards. Anybody have a link to such a copy of this standard?

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[Confuse Ed]

If you follow through a few levels of links from the artice, the standard is available online (for free) at:

http://www.unix.org/version3/online.html [unix.org]

You have to register (your name and email address) and agree to some terms and conditions to be allowed to read it.

Interestingly they also thought it important to answer the seemingly pointless question : how many API's are there? [unix.org] with a bar chart showing the number in a variety of specifications!

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[NeonSpirit]

This may be because the common unix specification was goiing to be called SPEC1170, until it went well over 1170 API's when they gave up :-(

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[Dazza]

As far as the increasing number of API's goes, I suspect this is simply more of the previous approach where the way to a 'single' standard was to include every other standard, leaving you with the same basic functions existing as several different API's.

This is *not* standardisation

Of course, maybe they've cleaned it all, and I'm talking out of my arse...

Re:Do standards cost to much for the open source?

[steveheath]

Open standards are normally cited as the basis of OSS. Closed standards are the problem (see Word format), where there is no way to be sure you are actually going to be compatible. Open standards allow freedom of choice for the app-user, encourage competition on the basis of functionality and are generally a good thing(tm).

Anyway, the link [unix.org] on the page can be followed to the spec, free registration required.

Excellent

[drdink]

Personally, I think this is great. Bringing SUS and POSIX together will make things much more portable once people actually meet the standard. The alternative is to have 47,000 different standards that all specify different things and then when you, the programmer and/or user, build your system, you must choose which one you want to meet.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

this is good, however, Linux (kernel) has never been entirely POSIX compliant. And worse, lots of programs written for linux aren't POSIX compliant and may require a lot of minor work to compile on other (posix) systems. Things like not including the proper header files (pre gcc 3.0 let you skip a lot of header files), or making assumptions (posix doesn't define stdin as fd 0. It does require that the STDIN_FILENO macro exist, though), etc can cause programs to compile happily, but fail to work as expected.

Well...

[RAMMS+EIN]

I think it's great that Unix flavors are still converging. However, with MicroSoft's big stakes in the desktop, server, and PDA market, many systems do not even come _close_ to being compliant. This might be good for big Unix vendors, because people can't switch to Windows, on the other hand, it's one competitor less with many remaining. My take is that GNU/Linux will take over the Unix marketplace step by step, which will lead to one new and glorified standard for Unices: GNU. However, that still leaves application developers with two platforms to support: GNU and win32 (and possibly Mac, if they don't adopt GNU). I wish corporations who didn't abide by standards would thereby push themselves out of the market, but in the MicroSoft case that seems in vain. Us developers are faced with the choice: boycott (reducing portability) or support (approving their violation of the standards). I'm hoping that people will see the light and ditch MicroSoft someday...

Re:Well...

[larry bagina]

openvms is certified posix compliant.

Windows NT/2000 with interix or USF is ertified posix compliant.

Sure, linux is open source, but the documentation is piss-poor. Check the BSD man pages. Check the new posix standard. then check linux documentation. A standard requires strict definitions of inputs, outputs, dependencies, side effects, etc. Linux can't provide that. glibc is slightly better, but it's not a standard.

To be published in mid December

[andkaha]

For those interested: The four parts of the ISO/IEC 9945:2002 standard will be published on the 15:th of December. But then again, those interested would probably already have seen this on the Austin group [opengroup.org] mailing list

Hmmmm... I wonder why my submission of this thing was rejected and why it still showed up the next day as submitted by "An anonymous reader". I'm not anonymous.