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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard

Posted by chrisd on from the office-ain't-done-till-bsd-won't-run dept.

We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.

2 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. Why OS X uses Mach by Animats · · Score: 2, Flamebait
    OS X is architected on top of Mach to keep Apple stockholders from asking why Apple paid $400 million for NeXT, bailing out Steve Jobs and his buddies.

    The argument for cancelling Copland (the original MacOS 8) was that it was going to take another year to make it work, and buying NeXT would get the new OS up faster. A similar argument was advanced against BeOS. That was, what, in 1996?

    The MacOS really needed a new layer underneath, but UNIX/Mach wasn't a great match. I'm not suprised it took Apple almost five years to make them play together.

    The original MacOS only supported one app at a time, and the addition of "multitasking" was a horrible hack internally. No memory protection, no process dispatching, no interprocess communication, and no way to reliably get an app that crashed cleaned up without a system crash. Developers used to call it the Mess Inside. Apple desperately needed a new kernely, and it should have happened around 1992 or so, by which time all new Macs had enough hardware for a good protected-mode OS. Basically, Apple was nine years late with their new OS, which is part of why Apple tanked.

    I once wrote an entire dial-up PPP implementation for the MacOS, called "Simple PPP". It was not fun.

  2. OS X is a crap, in a sense by logout · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Yes, it is a wonderful operating system. I have never been so excited to think about buying Apple's hardware to run its chic operating system. Now Mac has actually become a BSD box, where I can open a simple xterm and use gcc to compile my favorite Un*x application. There are already numerous OSX applications available in open or closed source form. For a fervent Linux user like me, it means I can have more choices --- I can live as a terminal-and-bash-addict and normal-commercial-software-user simultaneously. It's a wonderful thing, isn't it? I still have to run Windows 2000 to use some commercial application and I could not get rid of it. Yes, it's better to switch to Apple than remain in MS monopoly.

    However, Apple's strategy has a major drawback; Apple's product *must* run only on Apple's hardware. Think about OSX. The only part with the source code open is the core operating system. No Cocoa available for x86, even in closed source form. Apple won't allow its superb desktop environment to be ported to other platform than Apple's. If you're trying to run OSX on your PC hardware, you're going to have only a small text terminal window. Maybe you're going to think about compiling XFree86 yourself and installing GNOME or KDE on top of it.

    That is the dilemma of Apple. It must lock you into the Mac hardware platform, even though it is in desperate needs of larger user installed base. You always have to buy a new Macintosh to use Apple's OSX. You want to develop an application for OSX? You'll never see it running on Intel platform or whatever, because Apple won't port Cocoa to other platofrm than Apple's Mac.

    In order to break this chain of dilemma, I think Apple must port its entire OSX product into Intel platform. Apple will lose money from its reduced hardware sales, but once OSX for x86 reaches a critical mass of user base, then it can ship OSX to the major PC providers like Dell or Compaq. Or it can port its desktop part to Linux. Linux users still need a decent desktop environment with killer applications. We will never be able to see MS office running on the OSX desktop environment for Linux, but we will able to see Photoshop running on Linux at least. With the release of OSX deskop for Linux, Apple will have the benefit of porting the OSX applications for Linux to its own Mac platform easily. One of the strong point of Linux users is that it has a large pool of best developers in the world.

    If there were OSX for x86 or OSX desktop for Linux, I would definitely buy it and install it on my computer. It will mean that I can get rid of Windows installed in my box forever. But apple won't port its OSX to Intel platform in any case. That means I have to stick with Windows for a time until major software vendors release such things like photoshop for KDE. Apple is losing a best chance of conquering the Intel user base, surfacing themselves as a major competitor against Microsoft. But it rather chose to live with Microsoft and keep their realms separate. Perhaps that is why Microsoft continues to release IE for Mac and Office for Mac so seamlessly with Windows.