[illumos-Discuss] Questions

[Gary]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM, Stefan Parvu wrote:

> important is to be POSIX compliant from start or as much as
> possible. This will ensure compatibility with other systems
> and adoptation by various vendors. Thats very important to
> grow the community.

I've heard this a lot over the years and it's never made sense and
that's perhaps because I came to Unix as an end user and sysadmin
instead of as a programmer. POSIX and the Single UNIX Standards,
despite the good work they've done over the years, have never really
been on my list of reasons to include or exclude the adoption of any
particular operating system. For example, I've never thought, "I can
protect an org's entire infrastructure with [insert flavor] systems on
the perimeter but -- oh, damn, it's not fully POSIX compliant so I'd
better not go there." That said, not even OpenSolaris is compliant
along with every BSD and Linux distribution. So to worry about Illumos
being POSIX compliant when OpenSolaris never was certified seems to me
to be an unnecessary distraction.

-Gary