UNIX(R), POSIX, and Open Systems: The Open Standards Puzzle

UNIX, POSIX, and Open Systems discusses issues that affect many standards and profiles including networking; conformance testing; independence from a single programming language; and internationalization across human languages, codesets, and cultural conventions. Standards facilitate application portability, user portability, and interoperability among different versions of UNIX and other open systems. This is a how-to book for understanding, implementing, and using standards, explaining how standards are produced, and how to affect them. Highlights Include: - Descriptions of the major standards bodies, industry consortia, and user groups that produce specifications and standards, and of how different groups may be faster, broader, or better able to achieve a consensus in standardization - Discussions of POSIX standards and other specific standards related to the historical UNIX operating system - Emphasis on the role of networking in open systems and standards - Extensive coverage of profiles and their uses in implementing, selling, and buying computer software and hardware Highlights Include:

• Descriptions of the major standards bodies, industry consortia, and user groups that produce specifications and standards, and of how different groups may be faster, broader, or better able to achieve a consensus in standardization
  
  
• Discussions of POSIX standards and other specific standards related to the historical UNIX operating system
  
  
• Emphasis on the role of networking in open systems and standards
  
  
• Extensive coverage of profiles and their uses in implementing, selling, and buying computer software and hardware

The rapid growth of the UNIX market has resulted in a diversity of implementations of the operating system. To promote application and user portability, standards have been developed to remove incompatibilities among systems. This book will explain how the various UNIX standards have been developed and how they interrelate. The book gives programmers, marketing managers, sales managers, and system developers a place to turn before tackling the actual standards documentation--with complete overviews of the IEEE 1003 set of standards for operating system interfaces, facilities, and languages all commonly known as POSIX, as well as related UNIX communication standards.