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Workingmac.com Interview With Jordan Hubbard
LiquidPC writes: "workingmac.com has an interview
with Jordan Hubbard (one of the founders of the FreeBSD project, and
currently works for Apple on development of OS X). Questions range from
'How do open-source operating systems compare to closed-source operating systems?' to
'What does the future hold for FreeBSD?'" It's a quick interview, but a good read. Interesting that to talk about the Mac OS now is to talk about UNIX.
"The developer has to have a personal interest in the features in question..."
When you have people personally motivated to help support a peice of software I feel you get a superior product. Some mindless drone ordered to sit in front of a terminal to code a peice of software that he has no relation to is going to feel less motivtated to do a good job. So what if OSS has numerically less people developing for it then commercial sofware, at least it's poeple who actually care about the software and it's success. Think about it.
I posted to
you would know that it's because it takes a good length of time to get something as large as an OS ready. They wanted a nice stable, proven code-base to work from and so they picked a certain snapshot of FreeBSD and used it. That way you don't have to work out the nightmare of continuing to upgrade and merge old code with new code (which I get to do at work, wheeee). When Apple decided to go with OS X, FreeBSD 4.0 was likely in alpha stability.
OSX did not pop out overnight (or even in the last 6 months). You've seen how 'fast' Mozilla has come along, no?
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
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Gives a new meaning to illegal operation, doesn't it? Don't mix laws with operating systems, OK? Some things just don't have to be that efficient.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Mac OS X is a Unix. We check our disks with fsck, and we see what's running with top (although we have GUI apps we can use instead of the command line if we want). Man pages are all there. The default shell is tcsh. Emacs and pico and Apache are all there in every installation of Mac OS X. Strip off the GUI and you have Darwin, which is a Unix OS that's clearly derivative of Mach, BSD, and NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
Here is an interesting tidbit: it is taking a longer time for the bulk of Mac developers to port their apps to Mac OS X than it has for the bulk of Unix apps to show up. It's easier to make a case that Mac OS X is not Mac OS than it is to say it's not a Unix.
I mean, MacGIMP is here on Mac OS X now, and Photoshop doesn't even have a ship date yet (although it's been shown off publicly and is apparently just waiting for Mac OS X 10.1). The GIMP is running in rootless X Windows right on the Mac desktop. This is a Unix, buddy.
Even though Mac OS X has been certified as a Unix by the Open Group, you don't have to ask them anything in order to figure out if something is a Unix. Kleenex(TM) is a brand name, but it is also a generic term. When someone says, "have you got a Kleenex?" they do not care if you hand them a Puffs(TM) or whatever. When someone says they want "Unix reliability" they're talking about the general reliability of all Unix systems, not about Unix(TM).
Linux is Unix. GNU is Unix (although it is clearly not UNIX(TM), and the (TM) is the entire reason for the acronym). In every technical way, GNU and Linux were designed and implemented to be Unix operating systems. It is so much about compatibility that it's amazing to see people trying to act like Linux is an island.
If it runs Apache, it is a duck.
"an operating system with a UNIX personality"
I'd say the opposite. Mac OS X is an operating system with UNIX underpinnings, and a Mac OS personality.
After all, a personality is what gets expressed to others, not what's deep inside.
How exactly is OS X less like Unix than Mandrake? I can compile Unix binaries for it, it uses a unix kernel. Are you saying there's a UI wall where if there's too much of a non-geek front-end put onto an OS it's no longer worthy of the UNIX title? Is that the "traditional philosophy of UNIX" that it doesn't share?
Kevin Fox