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."

Comments

Berkely Software Distribution & Ma Bell.

[crovira]

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.

WOW! FUD BS from NOT M$!

[crovira]

Congratulations. You have just reiterated M$ argument about Linux.

You can trust Darwin/FreeBSD for the same reasons that you (and IBM and Oracle and ... ) can trust Linux.

Do you seriously think that anybody can corrupt the OS willy-nilly? Without review? &lt sigh&gt

Re:Apple lost it in the 80s. They never recovered.

[f5426]

> 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

Re:Compatibility with FreeBSD

[cplater]

I'd have to assume that Apple will wait for The Unified BSD Package Collection to be implemented before including any packaging scheme.

Re:Apple and BSD - The Microsoft of the future.

[TheOutlawTorn]

They will figure out some way to screw it up, they always do. They're kinda like Wile E. Coyote that way.

Re:Apple lost it in the 80s. They never recovered.

[DickBreath]

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.

Re:Apple is the enemy

[i, Mac]

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.

Re:Compatibility with FreeBSD

[Angelwrath]

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.

This ties in to Bill Gates == Sauron

[Hairy_Potter]

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?

Compatibility with FreeBSD

[osgeek]

I'd like to hear from any of the developers working on OSX.

• How easy is it to build current FreeBSD software on X?
• Are there any standard package managers included by default?
• Does it come with all of the build tools needed so you can normally just do the "./configure; make" mambo?
• Do you have to spend a lot of extra time tweaking your environment and downloading other libraries?
• What are the biggest differences that you notice from the shell prompt between a typical FreeBSD installation and OSX?

Do your own research

[maggard]

Invariably when a topic like this gets posted a half-hundred folks post the same questions about the topic, another half-hundred rush off to make fist-post without bothering to read the material and the rest of us get stuck wading through much redundant material.

Here's some answers

1. Apple's own MacOS X material
2. Apple's own Darwin material
3. A MacOS X developer site
4. An over-view of Mac-specific websites & their headlines
5. Current listings of MacOS X-specific applications

So please, before guessing or making wild-assed assumptions or making statements based on the *beta* how about just doing a reality-check first.

Apple lost it in the 80s. They never recovered.

[Flabdabb Hubbard]

As a one-time avid mac fan, I think Apple reached its technical peak with the Mac IIcx series, and System 7. Up until then, the mac had a really consistent user interface, and look and feel which was due (in my opinion) to the almost facist-like control Apple had over their API.

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 ?