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How Good Of A Unix Is Mac OS X ?
Anonymous Coward writes: "Greg Knauss, a UNIX guy from way back and a contributor to Suck, TeeVee, creator of Metababy, etc., has written a piece for Macworld.com. He looked at the Unix underneath the new Mac OS X Public Beta and has generally positive things to say, with a few caveats." Among these shortcomings are the lack of the GNU tools, about which Knauss says "... [W]hile the arrival of the GNU tool set -- the mainstay of Unix development -- is inevitable, it's a shame that Apple didn't see fit to include it in the Mac OS X beta."
Perhaps they were afraid that, by including the GNU tools, Stallman would badger them into calling it GNU/MacOS X :)
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
This is the most entertaining Slashdot discussion I've ever read.
On one hand, you have Unix weenies who will swear forever that MacOS is as stupid and lame as a jar of rocks painted like jellybeans, even when they themselves have to resort to FUD.
On the other you have people who have actually taken a look at OS X and can see that Apple's done a remarkable job at modernizing their OS to a Unix kernel.
Apple's finally succeded at breaking the Unix ranks into those who like Unix because it's better and those who like Unix because it makes them feel superior.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I found this in a post from Holt Sorenson on MacWorld.
Why gnu tools weren't included
On another note, I think it's shocking that to this day I still hear talk about:
1. The price of Macs. You can scan this very list to see that it's really not an issue anymore for what you get. I think that people might just be irritated that even a low-end mac is a high-performance machine compared to a less expensive piecemeal Intel box.
2. The availability of software. In the old days, the argument was that critical apps weren't available and so the machines are fully proprietary. This is of course absolutely the opposite now. Most of the things you *can't* get now are shareware or small-scale development items. Kinda like DOS compatibility with Windows right now.
3. The quality of the operating system. The normal Mac OS has stunk for a while. But the Unix in Mac OS X has been well proven in the last ten years (since NeXT).
Here's the post I found:
Posted By: Holt Sorenson Date: 15-Sep-200011:26p.m.
At the 2000 Usenix Technical Conference, Wilfredo Sanchez of Apple gave a presentation on The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments. The paper can be found at: http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENIX_2 000/
An audio recording of the presentation of this paper at USENIX 2000, including the Q&A session, is available Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast at: http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=332
During the questions period, he was asked if GNU tools would ship with OS X. He said that they would not because in an e-mail discussion with RMS, RMS insisted that OS X would have to be GPL'd if Apple included GNU tools.
-- Eli Juicy Jones
Follow the instructions here to restore the Unix development toolkit to OS X.
Fuck Slashdot
And while the arrival of the GNU tool set -- the mainstay of Unix development -- is inevitable, it's a shame that Apple didn't see fit to include it in the Mac OS X beta.
The reason for this may be so that mortal users are not expected to actually compile their own software to use it. Example: Windows doesn't come with compilers, so virtually all Windows software (even Apache, PHP, etc.) come in binary form.
From what I understand, the dev tools: Project Builder and friends (and even gcc, etc) will be available for free download from the ADC (Apple Developer Connection) site in October.
I'm fairly confident that compilers, in one form or another, will be freely available.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Also, Apple will release the developer tools to all online ADC members (free registration) in mid-October.
Hotline: Macintosh Support hotline! How can I help you?
User: Yeah, I am trying to use Perl to do some reporting on my apache access logs. But I have to recompile Perl to fix a bug in the regular expression matching, and there is no gcc installed on the system. What do I do?
Hotline: Ok sir is the computer plugged in?
User: Of course. (annoyed)
Hotline: Well, that fixes about 50% of the problems we get here.
User: But I just want to know how to install the GNU developer toolset.
Hotline: Ok sir, could you reboot the computer?
User: What the hell would that accomplish.
Hotline: Sir, please.
User: (pretends to reboot). Ok, rebooted
Hotline: Wow, you have a fast machine.
Did that fix your problem?
User: *dialtone*
There should be a FAQ...
Anyone know if Apple are planning a port to x86?
No, they are not. It would be financial suicide since Apple is a hardware company. If Apple ever went to x86 -- say, if the other members of the AIM consordium don't come down from their server and embedded white towers to make a good desktop chip again -- it would probably be done in such a way as to require the OS to only run on machines for which Apple got a cut of the revenue. Apple cannot survive as just an OS vendor, and unlike MS, Apple does not have enough other high-priced, high-demand software to subsidize their OS development.
The History of Mac OS X and the x86 family
When Apple was shopping around for an OS to replace the Mac OS, they happened to be pointed the right way to NeXT, Inc. who sold this little known OS called OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was a cross-platform, non-hardware dependent version of their original hardware-tied OS, NeXTSTEP. It ran on Intel, SPARC, m68k chips (and maybe a few others that I can't remember off the top of my head). Because of this, it had a beautifully portable code base. (It was also about $4000 per license, IIRC.)
Rhapsody is announced. Basically, this would be OPENSTEP on PPC and x86 which a Mac-ified interface and few new pieces of technology such as Java and Quicktime. The native environment will be known as the Yellow Box. All old Mac applications will run as second-class citizens in a seperate application known as the Blue Box environment. All new applications should be developed in the rich OPENSTEP APIs in Objective-C and, soon, Java.
Mac OS X would supposedly be the king of all Java platforms. If that wasn't good enough, the OPENSTEP APIs would be ported as an development layer for WinNT. (This was actually included for a while with WebObjects for NT.) This meant that there would be an extremely powerful and versatile set of APIs for universal Win NT and Mac development in two very clean OO languages -- Objective-C and Java. The first developer release of Rhapsody was shipped for PPC and x86.
Fast forward. Traditional Mac developers are threatening to abandon the Mac completely if they are going to have to abandon their old code base or forever have it run as a second-class citizen without the new benefits of the new Mac OS. Microsoft is one of these developers, and we all should know that if MS Office leaves the Mac, that's the death knell for the Mac -- at least at that time before the Mac's recovery had progressed far enough. Furthermore, MS was rumored to be upset at the prospect of the Yellow Box APIs for Windows and at having a viable competitor consumer OS on x86. Apple was also seeing little support for OEMs putting Rhapsody/x86 on their machines since they already had to pay MS for Windows on each one. Apple also realizes that if developers did adopt the new APIs, there would be less reason for people to by Apple hardware since they could get all the advantages without paying Apple -- especially since Rhapsody/x86 didn't require an Apple ROM.
So, all x86 releases are put on hold and cancelled. Rhapsody (a development name) is officially called Mac OS X (Ten, not Ehcks). The first developer's release of Mac OS X Server does not include an x86 version. In a year or two more, Yellow Box for NT would disappear from WebObjects. Originally, Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server would be different products, with Apple including licenses for some of their server software (WebObjects and Appletalk services) on the server version. Eventually, this is all scrapped in favor of one OS, since the distinctions between the two were minimal.
Fast forward. Apple releases the source code to the underlying BSD layer as they had previously promised as Darwin. Fast forward again. An Apple engineer boots Darwin on x86 and announces it to the world. Carmack does a little work on porting XFree86 to Darwin.
Fast forward to today. There is no x86 Mac OS X. There is an x86 port of Darwin. No, this is not the same. There is no Apple graphics layer and no Mac or OPENSTEP APIs included -- just BSD level stuff. There will probably never be an x86 Mac OS X. It would destroy Apple financially unless they take measures to secure revenue from Mac OS X sales in ways that would also make them unpopular, such as ridiculous prices for the new OS or only letting it run on machines with a special Apple ROM for which they charge money.
In the end, Mac OS X would always be more expensive than Windows since Apple does not have Office and other software to prop up its OS development, and most OEMs have to pay the Windows tax anyway. I repeat, Apple is a hardware company. Seperating the OS and the hardware divisions into two companies or eliminating one will kill them both. Apple needs a superior OS to sell their more expensive hardware, and they need to sell their hardware to pay for developing the OS. United, they stand, divided they fall.
As an aside, this is why Apple will never open the source to the higher level APIs. If you could remove the dependency on Apple to get Apple's OS, Apple would not get any more money. Apple would die. While many Open Source advocate would have no problem with this or even love to see it happen, Apple is not that stupid. This would be destroying the OS side of Apple. See the above paragraph for what would happen to the hardware side. It won't happen -- get over it.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Anyway, the deal is that the development tools aren't in the public beta you can buy from the Apple Store. However, registered Apple developers get all of the development tools, which includes a very nice IDE that is brand new and not based at all on the old NeXT ProjectBuilder.
Apple doesn't expect it's regular users to build software; they will install pre-built binaries. That, combined with the enormous size of all of the development tools and documentation, is the reason why the consumer versions of the OS won't have the tools. The development tools will always be something seperate for developers.
Burris
"strengths of a high-end, modern operating system: true multitasking, true memory protection, symmetric multi-processing." Those were features of a "high-end" operating system 20 years ago. BSD brought those features to the low end.
Doesn't GNU stand for GNU's Not UNIX? Then why are we basing the purity of MacOS-X based on its lack of GNU programs? Is this the new standard now, for all UNIX systems to come with gcc? Does this mean that Windows *with* a GNU compiler is more of a UNIX than Solaris *without* the GNU compiler?
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