But the fact remains, almost every other platform is less hackable than linux.
Officially Certified Unix --> Officially Certified Dinosaur. Great ksh88 compatability? Motif? Thanks, I'll actually leave the 1990s alone and come back to the now.
>But the fact remains, almost every other platform is less hackable than linux.
Was that a typo? If not, do you have any sources to show this? I don't know or have an educated opinion either way, but that statement does contradict common perception.
By almost every other, I think he means all the commercial distributions of UNIX, which really are not very interesting to most hackers. I don't think he meant the BSDs.
That's a strawman argument. The author says nothing about the Officialness of the Unix. His complaint is that he can't get at the guts of the system, nothing to do with branding.
My point had nothing to do with OS X being Unix (TM). It's just that OS X is a different platform than Linux and it shouldn't be surprising that things don't work the same way even though they're both Unix-y.
When Linux started to take over for old Unix workstations around the 2002-2004 time frame a lot of the old Solaris people would complain that "Linux doesn't have truss" or that "Linux's RPC headers are completely FUBAR." I would imagine they'd say even more vile things about OS X even though it has some fancy stamp of Unix approval.
Just so you know, people that have developed on Unix systems for decades have the same complaints about Linux.