OSX 10.5 (Leopard) gets UNIX 03 Certification

‘The Open Group’ has announced certification of Leopard (both Desktop & Server versions) against the UNIX 03 Product Standard. This puts OSX in the same league as the most well recognised UNIX Distributions from HP, IBM, and SUN.

The UNIX 03 Standard requires conformance to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification (see here). Essentially, it covers Internationalised System Calls and Libraries, Commands and Utilities, the C Language, and Internationalised Terminal Interfaces.

Other Products that have been certified are:

HP-UX 11i V3
IBM AIX 5L for POWER V5.2
Sun Solaris X86 or SPARC Platform Edition (10 and on)
Sun Studio (9 C 5.6 and on)

What does this mean? Conformation to a standard set of interfaces makes porting of applications between certified systems much easier. Also, Mac OSX is the first OS derived from BSD UNIX to meet the certification requirements.