Slashdot Mirror
Apple to Include BSD in WWDC
Chris Coleman writes "Apple has just announced their annual World Wide Developer
Conference to be held May 21 - 25, 2001. If you find yourself wondering why you should attend, let me see if I can help. In addition to the regular Mac OS application development, this year
Apple has added conference tracks for BSD UNIX and Darwin."
I have compiled several GNU and UN*X programs on MacOS X. Its fairly straight forward. The GNU development tools are available from Apple, they're a free download off their site. (Members of Apple's paid developer program received two CDs, one with Mac OS X Public Beta and one with the developer utilities.) The only issues I have run into are two. First, sometimes you have to replace the config.guess file with the new one from Apple,. Otherwise config scripts don't know what Mac OS X is. The other is for X Window based applications. The Mac OS X GUI is NOT based on X WIndows, however X Window ports are available, both commercial and free. In regards to the other aspects. Apple has renamed some directories, for example user directories are located in Users, with a capital U. Much of the other directory structure is present but hidden from the typical Mac user. For example, /etc and /usr are visible only from the command line. This is consistent with Apple's goal of hiding the Un*x underpinnings from typical users, but making it available to power users.
Traditional Unixen use libraries, MOSX uses frameworks. As such (and most of my time doing this has been during the MOSX Server days), some libraries are not there, but are there in the form of Frameworks. You link a library with -ldude, you link a framework with -Fdude. That tends to be a pain in the ass.
However, there's nothing stoping you from downloading libraries and installling them yourself so everything does work. And I think it was Wilfredo Sanchez who said they're just going to change it so the BSD stuff keeps using libraries.
Are there any standard package managers included by default?
Again... frameworks. Frameworks is part of a much larger, more modern system with its roots in the NeXT way of doing things. There is a system-wide installer and package system, and it is really, really good. Frameworks are a single bundle that contain all the headers, binaries, and version handling of a library. Frameworks are good.
I strongly recommend that you read: http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/SystemO verview/SystemOverview.pdf
If you're not impressed, there's something wrong with you... Does it come with all of the build tools needed so you can normally just do the "./configure; make" mambo?
I remember donig this in the old days (MOSXS) and getting told "My, you really ARE on a NeXT!" by configure :P
I did build AfterStep on MOSXS without too much trouble, but that was after trying to get it to build on Solaris, which was pure hell.
Do you have to spend a lot of extra time tweaking your environment and downloading other libraries?
MOSXS has two distinct application layers. There's the BSD one, which isn't really used, and the OpenStep one, which kicks ass. I tend to spend more time in the OpenStep-based one. People who are looking forward to porting OS X apps to Linux should pay more attention to GNUstep...
I do it, but I don't spend a lot of time doing it.
What are the biggest differences that you notice from the shell prompt between a typical FreeBSD installation and OSX?
MOSX uses zsh instead of sh. This totally rocks.
I do use FreeBSD all day, and that's what I notice the most :) I ended up making zsh my login shell on FreeBSD.
All of the other utilities tend to be pretty old though, like more and ftp. These are pretty nice on FreeBSD compared to OS X.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
however from what i understand, work is going well on an X-Server running side-by-side with Aqua.
Well, you can download a trial version of the side-by-side X-server from www.tenon.com (they're here in S.B., and a few of the people who work with me worked there). However, the 'real' version won't be free as in beer, or as in freedom. They've got introductory pricing of $199, instead of $250, and for commercial X-servers that's pretty reasonable, but still expensive for students and people used to free (in both senses) software.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
The only improvement Apple has made since then are hardware improvements, really.
/new/, just NT for the masses.
And Apple hardware rocks now.
The newer stuff is so much like UNIX workstation hardware it's not funny -
PeeCee hardware is archaic by comparison.
(Which reminds me...When the fsck are peecees gonna ditch the ancient BIOS firmware
and get OpenFirmware like *every other* modern platform out there?
I know it's possible (SGI's Intel boxen had it), but peecee
users and manufacturers are too stuck in the 80s to change.)
and I daresay that the UI experience isn't really any better either.
It is difficult to improve something that already is excellent.
Windows2K is really fundamentally different
No it's not. People have been using NT for years.
2000 is just the latest version. Hell, even the upcoming XP is nothing
Sure, NT is fundamentally different than 9x, but NT has been around for years...2000 is just NT in an incrementally prettier package...
It's still NT tho. The same NT APIs, the same blue screens, and the same flaky 3rd party drivers.
--K
Tell me what I get that's "better" with OpenFirmware?
/the/ same.
:P
A box that has basic intelligence even when there's no OS installed +more.
It's pretty cool stuff.
I'd argue that they've made it worse through some UI changes that make it act much differently, like the scroll bar gizmos. Then there's stuff like Quicktime where UI common sense gave in to the "skin" fad. And there's still too many modal dialogs, which I guess is fine in a non-SMP OS.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with the scroll bars, but I will give you that QT4 was a major cock-up for Apple UI design.
Comparing NT3.51, 4.0 and 2k and calling them the "same" is really stretching the truth.
Never said they were
But the core OS in each is basically the same, be it 3.51, 4 or 5 (2k).
MacOS 6, 7, 8 and 9 are basically the same between verisons, but with incremental updates in each major version.
It's the same phenomenon on a vastly different system.
Until a product is scrapped or rewritten, the releases are similar.
I'd say that each was an improvment on its predecessor,
That's usually what warrants bumping the version number up.
--K
Is there any pressure to use Objective C for development (not that I'd be adverse to that)?
From what I've seen, Obj-C is pretty intertwined with the NeXT technologies...
I'm starting to learn it tho, and so far, I like it better than C++.
Project Builder also has an option for Java development, which I still have to try out, soon as I have time.
--K
I for one look forward to the resurgence of easy-to-use Unix with the power of a Mac GUI.
Not to mention the NeXT development tools on OSX are really slick.
I'm amazed by just how fast GUI development is with
Project Builder, compared to, well, anything else.
I've disliked GUI development for a while, simply because dealing with positioning, alignment, layout managers, and such by hand is so tedious...
Interface Builder lets you graphically lay out your GUI[1],
and 'draw' connections between controls, classes, etc.
Then you just open the skeleton file it produces, and add your code for handling GUI events.
Way cool. It's painless GUI design like VB has, but without the icky BASIC coding.
[1]Yes, this tech has been around for years, and I'm aware of Glade and QT Designer. The NeXT toolset is, IMO, way slicker than either.
--K
in the latest "available" build (4k46) the XML .plist file for the Dock still includes all the options to set the orientation (left, right, top, bottom) and pinning (front, back, center) of the Dock. However, the ability to change it using the "Defaults" CLI hack has been taken away. I'm sure Apple will include these options in the final... otherwise it would be stupid to have them just sitting in the .plist file.
PPPoE support is in there, yup.
Current builds of OS X use SSH1 or 2 for Telnet access by default (you have to go turn on remote access and ftp in the "Sharing" preferences panel though, it's off by default). Hopefully, in light of the recent vulnerability found in SSH1, APple will simply use SSH2 exclusively to get around that hole.
I would go to MacWeek and check out the "PowerBook Diary" review... great series on the new Titanium 'Book.
Um... or not.
There is very little (read: no) market interest in alternatives to Microsoft on PC's. That's because MS has a monopoly on the PC operating system, which it leverages to do several interesting things:
- Bolster its monopoloies on business/offices software and internet browser software.
- Keep PC hardware makers from coalescing power. This keeps PC hardware as cheap commodity products.
- Keep Intel in check.
MS divides the PC hardware makers by controlling the standards (actually, they do most of their monopolizing by controlling standards; embrace and extend). For example, USB 2.0 exists almost entirely because MS doesn't control the FireWire standard. Since MS controls the hardware platform, any other OS company takes a huge risk running on PC's; they never know what MS will do to the hardware, which drivers will be closed, which specs will be difficult to implement.Solve this and you go a long way to breaking the MS stranglehold. This business model is, however, the one real way they have innovated.
Or did you just assume that Apple must be the enemy of Free software?
Think about it. In many respects Apple is far more evil than Microsoft.
What a tactful thesis statement.
Apple wants control of the software and the hardware.
It's called user experience. This is the only way to do it right. Dell and Compaq are at the mercy of Microsoft's implemenation. There's only so much they can do to improve the computer since they can't really touch the OS. The hardware/software intergration is also why USB, FireWire and AirPort could be available instantly in new machines.
Steve Jobs has an open hostility to open source code
That's a fairly odd statement.
and he has never given anything back to the community that wasn't already there
Umm, what? QuickTime Streaming Server, NetInfo, and OpenPlay/NetSprocket spring to mind. I'm sure there are others.
He hijacked Mach, and he's trying to do the same with *BSD.
This doesn't make any sense. Avie Tevanian was one of the key people behind Mach at Carnegie Mellon. It was later donated to the FSF. Jobs hired Avie for next, where they used Mach. I don't know if the Next modifications to Mach were made available to the public at the time, but they are available now in Darwin.
The BSD comment doesn't make any sense. How could Apple be hijacking it? All of their BSD stuff is part of Darwin, and the most recent revision to the license appears to have appeased just about everyone.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
There is one reason Apple is using BSD for OSX. ITS FREE TO STEAL.
The reason Apple is using BSD is that it was part of NextStep. And how are they stealing it? All of the BSD stuff is redistributed under ASPL. I though everyone was relatively happy with this license now.
If Apple was interested in an "Open Source" or "Free" (libre or gratis) they would likely have chosen GNU/Linux because of its momentum and (justified) hype.
How is Darwin not open source?
Apple can no longer keep MacOS current and powerful - they saw themselves as quickly becoming the odd man out in the coming Linux jihad against M$ and decided they needed to align themselves with what will likely be the 'winner' 15 years from now.
That's interesting speculation, but unfortunately it has nothing to do with reality or history. At the end of 1996, Apple was looking to purchase a company to supply the foundation for their next-generation operating system. A lot of people though they were going to buy BeOS. They bought NextStep instead. I doubt this had anything to do with Linux.
What I would like to stress is that BSD is enabling Apple to exploit the 'grunt' coding done by thousands of BSD hackers - offering them a significant subsidy. OSX is the GUI, API and Object Model. BSD/Mach is the foundation.
I don't really see where you're going with this. I think most people reading this topic is aware of where BSD comes from. But to suggest that Apple is reselling free BSD software is just insane. OSX/Darwin uses BSD for the process/permissions model, threading, networking and the tools. This is not the majority of the code in the OS.
Avie Tevanian was one of the key architects of Mach, and he's Apple VP of Software Engineering. I think he has some right to use it if he chooses.
But I am not ready to accept that Apple isnt completely operating in their own best interests.
Apple is primarily operating in their own interests. They are not Debian (you know what I mean). They are a for-profit company that is releasing some open source software under a good license.
I think IBM is a better example of someone who 'gets it'.
Because they're contributing to Linux? Big deal. What's the point of Apple doing that? Linux makes sense on IBM's hardware, it really doesn't all that much on Apple's machines. IBM hasn't open sourced AIX, have they?
Apple is hoping to rape BSD to sell hardware.
Right, BSD is going to sell the hardware. That's it.
If anything, OSX is going to give an emormous boost to BSD concepts.
If all of OSX was "COMPLETELY" Free Software (and free to be completely ported to other architectures) I would be more enthusiastic
In which case OSX wouldn't even exist. The reason Apple could justify to the shareholders the idea of pouring three years of development time into creating OSX is because there is payoff at the end. If there was no potential for a substantial return on investment, then OSX wouldn't even exist, and Unix evolution would feel the effects.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Why are all BSD people blind to the fact that Apple and anybody else can steal all they want from software under the BSD license and contribute back little or nothing of any changes/ehancements they make?
Why are you blind to the fact that every Apple does with BSD is released under ASPL?
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
ok, let me get this straight. You would not run apple on a server because it is bsd and open source. Then, by the same token, you would also not run linux on a server. But, on the other hand, you would run windows and other microsoft products because they are closed source and have no outside developers. I'm not quite sure of the understanding behind here, because we all know that the core BSD code is not junk, not written by incompetent programmers (imo) and stable enough to be run in most environments. And best of all, its not Windows.
Well, perhaps Microsoft is a bad example because they do farm out a lot of technology work to outside consulting firms, which may or may not hire incompetent monkeys and or midgets to do their work.
I think that i'll continue to run the risk of supporting bsd/*nix instead of putting my life on the line with windows (which for the record, i think their luna interface needs some work).
i was going to respond to this message myself, but you covered just about everything i wanted to say. after running OS X for a while i'm amazed at how familiar i am with things just from my BSD experience. the two are very similar.
the only real problem i can see is that OS X doesn't have an X-Server. this obviously makes buiding X-applications an impossibility (realistically). however from what i understand, work is going well on an X-Server running side-by-side with Aqua. when this happens, OS X will definitely be my UNIX workstation OS of choice.
I did build AfterStep on MOSXS without too much trouble, but that was after trying to get it to build on Solaris, which was pure hell.
this made me laugh, because i remember thinking this the other day. i've had way more problems compiling applications for Solaris (especially opensource applications) than i have for OS X/Darwin. i'd say that makes it pretty compatibleon a somewhat related topic, has anybody had any luck compiling BIND 9.1 on OS X? there seem to be issues with OS X and the ssl library that i'm definitely not qualified to fix. has anybody had any luck with this?
- j
Correct. There has been a "BSD in Mac OS X" session at WWDC for the past three years, mostly about the userland side of things. I demoed at the first and presented the last two of them, and even invited Jordan Hubbard to do past of the talk last year, to give us all an update of what FreeBSD is up to and how that might related to Darwin. I even came up with some cool demos, and QuickTime demos can be a hard act to follow. There are typically also related sessions on other parts of Darwin, including one on the kernel, which includes material on both Mach and BSD; another on filesystems, which are based on the BSD VFS layer; another on I/O Kit which is Darwin's driver model, different from BSD; and also one on Networking, which also lives in the BSD side of the kernel. WWDC is about Apple technology. Mac OS X is the big thing, and BSD is most decidely a part of the picture.
nah, their hardware is still not really competitive with the utter cheapness of x86 stuff outside of niche markets. If you beleive some figures as to desktop share, for every mac sold, 10 x86 boxes are (probably more than that becuase not every x86 box is destined to run windows (just the vast majority of them)). If they want to compete they need to offer a functional machine for <= $500-600 (becuase I can build or buy a perfectly reasonable machine for that much from any of a dozen or more places off the top of my head).
Say whatever you want about Apple software, but realize that they are and always will be (more than likely) a hardware company. It's not "Buy OSX, it's great!", it's "OSX is great! Buy a mac...".
So they have the mindset (Jobs is just as much a monomaniac as Gates is, he just trys to appear nicer while I don't think Gates cares one whit), and potentially the software (if they write their own office suite becuase as soon as MacOS was a threat to MS...), but they'd have to port to x86 for any monopoly plans to work. I don't see this happening any time soon, for political reasons more than technical ones.
--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
guess I gotta go get more coffee before I read slashdot in the AM..
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
> Steve Jobs has an open hostility to open source code, and he has never given anything back to the community that wasn't already there.
Wooov. That is a pretty ridiculous statment. The sources of NeXTstep are almost fully avalaible, under the sweet name of the first (early last year) darwin distribution. There are a lot of thing there. netinfo, for instance, is a crude counter example of your troll.
Sure, NeXT did not donate a lot to open source, but more than what they really had to.
Can you point me to the source of obsolete Microsoft products ?
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
BSD Userland is in MacOS X, but the kernel is Mach. I think if you look at the records, you will find that Avie Tenanian had a part in the development of that kernel. Darwin is very BSD like, and it is open source. This is a win/win scenario as far as I can tell :)
-- Charles A. Plater
Not so. As with the FreeBSD and all the BSD projects there is a CVS tree, and only a select few have commit rights to the tree, so just because any schmuck off the street can send updates, that can and should be rejected if they are suspect.
-- Charles A. Plater
*rolls eyes*
There are quite a few True Believers on the macosx-dev list that will flame you relentlessly for wanting to write in Java, yes. We just had a big fight over that, and the moderator stepped in with
"This list is provided so that developers can help each other write software for Mac OS X.
"Mac OS X has a wealth of APIs, and they're not at all exclusive: a single application may use OpenGL for drawing, Cocoa for input, BSD for networking, and Carbon or CoreAudio for sound. Questions about all of these are welcome on this list, along with any other Mac OS X APIs like IOKit, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, SecurityCore (the updated Keychain API), and Java (and that's by no means an exhaustive list). Questions about the development tools provided with Mac OS X such as ProjectBuilder and cvs are also quite welcome. As long as your question is specific to Mac OS X development, you're in the right place."
And that would be about the best words on the subject.
The kernel architecture of Mac OS X includes operating system services derived from FreeBSD (Berkeley Software Distribution, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. In addition, new technologies, such as the I/O Kit and Network Kernel Extensions (NKEs), have been designed and engineered by Apple to take advantage of advanced capabilities such as those provided by an object-oriented programming model.
Looks like its not so much about BSD Unix, but more about the Apple extensions on the BSD level, specifically drivers. Which is a good thing since few seem to be writing drivers (or at least releasing them) for OS X yet.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
Larry Ellison == Saruman -- he wants so badly to rule the world, but he just isn't powerful enough to replace Sauron.
Steve Ballmer == the Mouth of Sauron
Linus Torvalds == Celebrimbor, forged Linux on his own, out of the watchful eye of Sauron. Therefore Linux was not contaminated by Sauron's evil. Sauron hates Linux and wishes to destroy it and all who benefit from it.
Novell == Osgiliath, fell in the war with Mordor. Now just a ghost town between the warring parties of Gondor and Mordor.
Steve Wozniak == Tom Bombadil, extremely powerful, but prefers to sit in his own little corner as the events of the outside world unfold.
if you don't min bringing in the Silmarillion:
Morgoth == chairman of IBM (whoever it was circa 1981). He was a greater evil than Sauron ever was, but banished to oblivion by the Valar (the US Govt.). He fostered the evil which became Sauron.
Bill Joy == Feanor, created vi, the most wondrous tool ever made, but was excessively proud. Sun == the Sons of Feanor, forever fighting the behemoth of Redmond, but never to conquer.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
Hate to tell you this, but Apple isn't using the BSD kernel...they use Mach. Of course, all the rest of the BSD binaries are there, but not the kernel...
Next time spend "mush" more time analysing the scenario...
Out of curiousity, why would I pay to go to a conference regarding Apple and FreeBSD? Number one, there will obviously be a major bias towards Apple software products (which I don't care for). But besides that, there is a TON of information online on the nuances of FreeBSD, a TON of mailing lists, and a TON of people willing to help out for free?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Mach is derived from BSD too, although it's an
offshoot of an earlier ancestor than FreeBSD.
PS You can't 'steal' BSD licensed code - it's
written with the intention that it should be used
by other people (as long as they adhere to the license).
Intellectual property rights are a complex issue as there are so many different areas that it has to be applied to. Each area has to be looked at differently. For example, there is a big difference in claiming an algorithm is your intellectual property and that of claiming a medicine is your intellectual property. Similarly, to claim that certain strings of words are your property is again completely different. Personally, I feel that the arguments for having intellectual property rights are insignificant compared to that of not having them.
There are enough examples of stupid claims to intellectual property that I don't really need to back up the argument. Even the arguments for intellectual property that people bring are usually weak. For example, peolple claim that it wouldn't be worth researching medicine if it they couldn't protect their findings. Since when has medicine been about making money out of the sick and needy! The companies then go out and exploit the poor countries that are desperate for the medicine and prevent them from making their own. Mean while you have people dying around the world of horrific diseases becuase they couldn't afford the medicine that the big medical companies are protecting behind their intellectual property rights. Just last week I read in the paper about a 8 year old Iraqi boy who died because he couldn't afford the $6 medicine becuase it was more than his months wages.
Meanwhile, you want to celebrate the greatness of the US. You should travel the world and see it for yourself. Okay, the US may have technology but you will find that the other cultures and countries have other things to offer that are much better than can be found in the US. But go ahead, point your finger and shout communist whenever someone disagrees with intellectual property. One day however you might see the other side of the argument. It is not about not liking people being rich. I have no problem with rich people. It is how the rich become richer by using things like intellectual property rights to maintain their monopoly in a market. This is always at the expense of the poor and needy and always against the general good of society. Both inside and outside the US.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10);'
>They clearly want to promote a free Unix to remove the amount of money they have to spend themselves. They don't clearly want to promote Unix to get free developers. Don't forget, many in the Mac community don't have Unix knowledge or Unix programming skills so with OS X coming in a month, it'd be a good idea to start promoting the lower level abilities of the OS.
and, yes, I know, don't feed the trolls, but really, just what is this?
What is Apple's market share? Who are their core users? What "evil empire" handed them a big chunk of cash a few years ago?
I'd really like to hear some elaboration on just how you came up with this beautiful fantasy theory.
don't get me wrong, I've got macs (from an SE to an old powerbook, to a PPC601/G3 mutant box), I love my macs. My G3 runs MkLinux, too. But as far as Apple becoming the next evil empire, well, they missed that boat a while back, and they know it.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Its not Sun or Solaris.
The 'purity' problem dates back to when AT&T seeded universities with Unix back in the '60s when the first Minis were making their appearance.
They had to rewrite all their code to be clean of any AT&T code.
BSD has been at it a very long time.
Linux is a "purity problem" free OS thanks to Richard Stallman but its still trying to solve some problems which BSD (and Solaris and VMS yadda, yadda) solved a long time ago. Still the 2.4 kernel is good enough to propell it forward into the next decade or two.
After that we may not be able to recognize the kinds of hardware we'll be playing with.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Congratulations. You have just reiterated M$ argument about Linux.
... ) can trust Linux.
You can trust Darwin/FreeBSD for the same reasons that you (and IBM and Oracle and
Do you seriously think that anybody can corrupt the OS willy-nilly? Without review? < sigh>
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
> Anyone who ever wrote a mac application in the 80s or early 90s will tell you, their style guidelines made it IMPOSSIBLE to write an inconsistant gui
> What do others think ?
That you take your dreams for reality. Consistant Mac gui ? I saw so much applications that missed the TrackGoAway() call that it isn't funny (note for the uninformed. The original Mac toolbox was [and still is] a b*tch. Even windows is easier to deal with.). Apple guidelines were very restirctive and were blown away by apple itself numerous times (Hey, who would pretend that HyperCard followed the User Interface Guidelines ?). I was so disgusted of my Inside Mac User Interface that I trowed it in a fire.
Btw, the holy grail of UNIX/GUI was not A/UX, but, of course, NeXTstep. And rejoice, as Mac OS X is basically NeXTstep 6.
And writing an inconsistant AppKit application is really difficult. Writing a consistant Mac application was a nightmare.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I'd have to assume that Apple will wait for The Unified BSD Package Collection to be implemented before including any packaging scheme.
-- Charles A. Plater
They will figure out some way to screw it up, they always do. They're kinda like Wile E. Coyote that way.
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
I got to see A/UX in about the 1989 ish time frame. (Don't remember exactly when.)
I was working for a company that developed a screen-sharing application, similar to VNC, that run on Mac. We wanted to make it work on Windows, and even be able to control Mac from Windows and vice-versa.
One of our guys was to prototype some code that could convert Apple's QuickDraw calls into GDI and vice versa. He did it under A/UX. When he demoed the code to the rest of us, it was under A/UX on a Mac II.
It was a Mac II box I had personally ran Mac OS on a couple years prior. I couldn't believe the performance of this old machine running A/UX. It was unbelievable! It practically made the hardware sing and dance.
It was at this point that I was impressed enough with Unix to realize that I wanted to learn more about it. Something that remained out of my reach (both time and cost) for a few years until Linux came along.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Yes, he hijacked Mach from the guy who wrote a large chunk of it. Oh, wait. No, he hired the guy who wrote a large chunk of it. Made him a VP, too. Go figure.
You probably don't spend much time on Darwin development lists, or you don't know that Apple does contribute its work back to open-source projects such as Apache (they made modifications to support Mac OS X, for example)...
Perhaps you don't understand that due to the BSD license that if Steve Jobs really hated open source that much, he wouldn't HAVE to share back if he didn't WANT Apple to do so. If this were so, Apple would not have anything called Darwin, or the APSL, or any of its other released code.
I imagine he feels there's a place for free code and a place for proprietary code.
I don't know about the Steve Jobs of old, but the man at Apple now seems different. Perhaps the years in between gave him a little maturity in how he handles things. This isn't Steve Jobs I or Steve Jobs of NeXT.
I can see why you posted as an AC. Almost all of your statements are inflammatory and unfounded.
I've tried neither FreeBSD or Darwin, but I follow the two closely. In terms of compatibility, Jordan Hubbard did a review of OSX here:
Salon Article
However, his technical assessment and comparison of OSX to FreeBSD is on the second page, here.
To quote some of his comments:
"But as a portability benchmark -- a criterion with which to judge how easy it is to get foreign software running in Mac OS X -- this was certainly not bad at all and I had much the same good results with TCL, another popular open-source application. Porting Unix software to OS X is clearly far less work than trying to port it to Windows 2000 and with OS X providing such a high degree of Unix-compatibility, something like the FreeBSD ports collection (which highly automates the process) would make the third-party software situation pretty close to ideal."
Also, Apple is making some contributions to the Open Packages project. Fred Sanchez, the former technical lead for Darwin, is a developer on the project. Fred recently left Apple, but that is moot - he will still have a lot of involvement with Open Packages, Darwin and BSD from what I am to understand.
All in all, it looks like Darwin is as close to a BSD as one could expect from a proprietary company like Apple - certainly, within one year of March 24th, OSX/Darwin will have a large installed base of users depending daily on BSD code, and Apple will be one of the biggest distributors of Open Source software, as well as software available under its own APSL license. Cheers.
A few days ago, someone was trying to map Tolkien characters to Software personalities, starting with Bill Gates == Sauron.
Someone suggested Steve Jobs == Gandalf. Close, but not close enough. Might I suggest a different wizard, one who started out with the best intentions, but was then snared by evil into remaking his world into a child's imitation of Sauron's, yes, Steve Jobs == Saruman.
Then it starts to fall into place:
Mordor == Redmond
Orthanc == San Jose (or wherever Apple is located, Cupertino maybe?).
Denethor == some OS/2 executive, ensared by Bill Gates evil plan, as Denethor was ensnared by the Palantir.
That leaves Gandalf, might I suggest UNIX == Gandalf, for UNIX was almost dead, until Linux came along and created a resurgence.
Which leads to NT == Balrog, something almost good enough to kill UNIX.
And RMS == Galadriel, as they both helped rejuvanate their peers, and both wear green tights.
Of course, Linux == Aragorn
ERS == Boromir
Allan Cox == Gimli
Steve Ballmer == Mouth of Sauron
and howabout
Commander Taco == Frodo
Hemos == Samwise
Any more?
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Here's some answers
So please, before guessing or making wild-assed assumptions or making statements based on the *beta* how about just doing a reality-check first.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Anyone who ever wrote a mac application in the 80s or early 90s will tell you, their style guidelines made it IMPOSSIBLE to write an inconsistant gui. (unlike X11, and to a lesser extent Windows9X).
But what must remain the alltime best OS ever, the 'Holy Grail' that both open source zealots and capitalistic monopolists alike have yet to achieve was reached by Apple with A/UX 3.0.
Here was an OS that combined the ease-of-use of a a mac (brain dead point and click) with the powerful sophisitcation of a full blown UNIX implementation. It was quite simply a technical tour-de-force that has not been equalled to this day.
Apple now realise this is the way forward, and hopefully with darwin/OS10 whatever they have found the path they so sadly lost in the early 90s.
I for one look forward to the resurgence of easy-to-use Unix with the power of a Mac GUI.
What do others think ?