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+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2010, 2011, 2013 Free Software Foundation,
+Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled [[GNU Free Documentation
+License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!tag faq/support]]
+
+[[!meta title="POSIX compatibility"]]
+
+Is it favorable of rather a hindrance to be compatible to POSIX and similar
+standards?
+
+A lot of things in POSIX et al. are designed for [[UNIX]]-like systems with
+traditional monolithic [[kernel]]s.
+
+Thus, a [[microkernel]]-based system, as ours is, has to employ a bunch of
+detours, for example to implement the [[`fork` system call|glibc/fork]].
+
+On the other hand, (mostly) complying to these standards, made a really big
+body of software *just work* without any (or just trivial) [[hurd/porting]].
+Especially so for command-line programs, and libraries.
+
+But: a large part of today's user programs are not written according to POSIX
+et al. low-level interfaces, but against GNOME, GTK+2, and other high-level
+frameworks and libraries.  It may be a valid option to enrich these instead of
+striving for total POSIX compliance -- and the high-level programs (that is,
+their users) may not even notice this, but we would avoid a lot of overhead
+that comes with wrapping the [[Hurd interfaces|hurd/interface]] to be POSIX
+compliant.