Also, POSIX is basically irrelevant now. There are only two Unixen that anyone uses: RMS/Linux and whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS.
That's just not true. There are various BSD systems, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc. still exists, Alpine uses busybox.
Hell, I still see people being stuck with csh scripting sometimes with no alternative (sucks to be them!)
There is some common software that wants to run on all these platforms. Do you or I need to care about that for our Docker build script or whatnot? No, probably not. But that doesn't mean others don't. There's still very much a valid use-case for POSIX, even though it doesn't apply to everything.
Lots of specialised hardware ( networking or storage for instance) uses various flavours of *BSD under the hood, which is reflected in the main enterprise contributors to FreeBSD.
Maybe one day you’ll try out OpenBSD and find that you actually like it… and then you’ll be hit by the force of hundreds of thousands of software developers who subscribe to the philosophy you describe above. Standards are important — they’re the balance between a monopoly and a fragmented ecosystem, and give developers a chance to create new platforms that can innovate while supporting existing code.
> whatever outdated garbage userspace Apple is shipping with macOS
Is that a criticism of the FreeBSD userspace? Because that's where much of Apple's UNIX userspace is derived from, and they're regularly synced with upstream.
How much of macOS is actually still upstream BSD. I was under the impression they were slowly ripping it all out and replacing it (launchd, different logging subsystem, different file paths/directories)
I assume the parent is referring to command line utilities like sed, awk, and coreutils. The examples you're referring to are Apple's own software and not forks, so it'd be weird to call them "outdated."
Moving away from standards won't make it any easier to diversify our operating system choices. Standards compliance is what allows alternatives to be usable with existing software.
A lack of alternatives simply means that not enough standardization is happening, and we need more standards compliance.
