I guess everyone was just bored.
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Linux / GNU is definitely not UNIX. But it’s similar.
The waters are bit muddy these days, as most of the modern shells (which most “proper” unices also use; e.g., solaris, *BSD, macOS, etc.) are GNU licensed (e.g., bash) and the the GUIs are either GNU or common between Unix and Linux, but there are definitely differences in the base system.
The certification costs money, so free Unices like FreeBSD may not have the certification, but FreeBSD is actually based on the original BSD source (along with Net and OpenBSD) so they’re about as close to the original unix as you can get in a modern platform.
OS X actually used to have UNIX certification back in the days of Tiger, etc. Not sure if it still does. It’s more UNIX than Linux.
The Linux/GNU user-land tools for the base system definitely have a different flavour to proper unix.
freebsd ships with sh and csh by default. Solaris and illumos also don’t ship with bash by default, nor does openbsd, IIRC.
Linux came from Minix, Which was a posix compliant Unix designed to run on the 8088. It also came in 286 and 386 versions. Linus I believe was a student of Andy Tannenbaum.
Somewhere you may be able to find the arguments Tannenbaum and tovalds (I can’t spell very good) on Usenet.
Basically Torvalds started working on a new kernal. Then he put it in usenet, It was either the minix or one of the unix threads or groups and invited people to help out
Back in the 90’s his book was like 80 flipping bucks, now it’s allot cheaper
Getting Minix to run on a 5 slot IBM PC with a 20 meg hardcard was fun, 5 minutes later I reinstalled MSDOS and it became usefull again and more fun with Nettamer and a modem
bash was merely an example. pick gnome if you like.
macOS ships with Bash. I thought Illumos shipped with bash, but whatever.
Almost everyone using those platforms installs bash anyway.
Point being, there are differences, but things are a bit muddy particularly on a desktop variant as there are so many GNU tools on a typica (Not necessarily OOB, but as actually used by end user)l unix desktop. GCC, etc. has often been used on Solaris since way back in the 90s, rather than paying for Sun’s compiler.
Also, linux and minix have nothing to do with one another really (other than Linus being a minix user at the start). The code is not similar in any way, but Linus did use minix to host compilation of linux. That’s about it.
AFAIK linux contains no Minix code.
the most important difference between linux and minix is that minix became the dominant OS on desktop systems after 2009 via the IME
but seriously: the reason they’re called unix-likes and not unixes is because they never branched from a unix codebase. That’s all that means.
The definition isn’t muddy. One codebase originates with unix, the others were built as workalikes, and don’t share code. That’s it. It doesn’t infer any magical properties to the ones that branched off from unix, but that’s the line.