________ (fill in the blank) as POSIX Compatible

First of all I am not a POSIX specialist. I can't really claim to be a Windows 7 expert, yet.

Thanks to Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX; I can say that its the craziest thing I've ever heard of. First of all POSIX as a Unix/Linux/BSD standard makes sense. You're talking Macintoshes and Granny Smiths. But grafting it onto Windows makes about as much sense as putting air conditioning on a fish. I'm sure it made sense to somebody at Microsoft. But I'll bet it was so Microsoft could make a big government sale. Insisting on POSIX compatibility might have even been a ploy by the contracting agency to try to keep Microsoft out of the bidding sometime back in the past.

What I find hilarious is the certification process allows for "partial" conformance to POSIX standards. That sounds an awful lot like a "one from column A and two from column B" certification standard. "Our computer is POSIX certified if you read a file but not when you edit it." (Yeah that's simplistic but you get my reasoning.) POSIX is probably one area of Open Source Software concerns that has become a pain-in-the-posterior for the OSS advocates. Its so anti-anarchy and freedom-fouling. You just don't organize chaos when everything is going so good.

Most of the download previously blogged about were chunks of software to enable Unix Services on a Windows Server 2008 installation. Another big portion of it was to allow for Visual Studio to be used as the IDE to develop Unix-based C projects. I laughed out loud. (What? Eclipse not good enough for ya?)

I'm sorry but it didn't make sense a few years back to put it on a Windows server then and it still doesn't make sense. Samba works so much easier.

BTW did you know that Samba can be used to serve up NFS files and printer services on systems OTHER than the one its hosted on? All it takes is a few edits in smb.conf. When defining shares, use the fully defined name, i.e. \\server\share. Make sure the users have file permissions on the remote Linux system. Comes in handy when you want to confine the Windows clients to their own little chunk of network. Just push another NIC into the Samba server slots and keep the Windows clients in their own subnet ghetto for the price of another net switch.