Compliance vs Conformance?

What is the difference between compliance and conformance
and what does that mean to you and me? Or more importantly what does this mean
to your project?

Well, compliance is an informal industry term generally accepted to
mean the system provides support for some of a given standard.
Technically, an OS that provides only one API of a POSIX
standard is "compliant," though not very useful. Vendors of compliant
systems are generally expected to offer documentation describing which
parts of the standard are supported, and which are not. Wind River for instance, has such a statement to show "compliance" levels
of its VxWorks Operating System against the various POSIX standards. This reads like 100%
conformance to SCA 2.2.1 (another POSIX Subset for Software Defined Radio)
etc.

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