I just wanted to clarify what I wrote above that using "Unix-like" to describe a product is illegal. It's the same as if Burger King said, "Our company is McDonald-like" Basically, if you are trying to name-drop, or profit from another trademark's popularity, to increase your own, you are infringing on their rights.

Or maybe the title should be written as "the steady decline of Unix Server License sale"

No. The title is right. You are just trying to generalize something that is specifically, and legally defined. You can argue that other systems even, DOS are similar to or like UNIX, but you can't say that they are UNIX.

Mac OS X, client and server are UNIX because they satisfy the Single UNIX Specification. They have to satisfy this specification because the Open Group said so. The Open Group owns the trademark for UNIX. The SUS is an extension of POSIX drafted by the Open Group. If you say you are a UNIX system, it means you satisfy the owner's requirements. If you don't, you are doing an illegal thing and the Open Group can take you to court if they chose to. This isn't evil. What is happening is people are trying to generalize UNIX into a broader definition. It is the trademark owner's responsibility to fight these attacks against their property. If they don't, the name falls back into general use.

Having standards are important. USB would be pretty terrible if companies made USB devices that worked similar to other USB devices. You may have to purchase a USB controller that worked for that device, which really gets away from what USB is all about. The same is true with UNIX. UNIX machines typically run enterprise type software. For instance, Oracle bought Sun; Oracle produces enterprise database software and Sun produces the OS they run on, Solaris SPARC. Eventually Solaris ran on x86, but that is getting offtopic. What's important, is these machines need to have high uptimes and allow different manufacturers to compete with each other to prevent a company from getting locked into one manufacturer of UNIX machines. In theory, you should be able to replace an IBM AIX with Sun Oracle Solaris or HP-UX.

See here for versions of UNIX that satisfy the 03 revision: http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/xy.htm

Huh? +4 informative? I've been absent from /. for a good 5 years, but in my day that comment would have looked like

A lot of tools have diamond blades.

How about ... "circles"?

Each activity presents a new circle of acquaintances and a few from each circle might end up being parts of other circles. This really seems to solve that privacy niche that is so lacking in Facebook.

Someone should do this.