2005 was a busy year for me as of POSIX was published (the the USENIX standards represen- Shell and Utilities volume), and tative. There are three major it became a second ISO standard. NICHOLAS M. STOUGHTON standards that I watch carefully: Amendments to these standards I POSIX, which also incorpo- were also under development, USENIX rates the Single UNIX Specifi- and led to the addition of real- cation time interfaces, including Standards I ISO-C pthreads, to the core system call I The Linux Standard Base (LSB) set. Many of the other projects Activities died away as the people involved In order to do that, USENIX lost interest or hit political road- funds my participation in the blocks (most of which were Nick is the USENIX Standards committees that develop and reported in ;login: at the time). Liaison and represents the maintain these standards. Association in the POSIX, ISO C, Throughout 2005, the Free Until the end of the twentieth and LSB working groups. He is century, POSIX was developed the ISO organizational repre- Standards Group (FSG) also sentative to the Austin Group, helped fund these activities. For and maintained by IEEE exclu- a member of INCITS commit- each of these, let’s look at the his- sively. At the same time, the tees J11 and CT22, and the Open Group (also known as Specification Authority sub- tory of the standards, then at group leader for the LSB. what has happened over the past X/Open) had an entirely separate but 100% overlapping standard,
[email protected] 12 months or so, and, finally, what is on the agenda for this known as the Single UNIX year.