A FreeBSD "Spork" With Touches of NeXT and OS X: NeXTBSD

There are a lot of open source operating systems out there; being open source, they lend themselves to forks, clones or near clones, and friendly offshoots. There are even services to let you customize, download, and (if you choose) bulk-install your own OS based on common components. Phoronix notes a new project called NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes, in part because of the developers behind it, and in part because of the positive thoughts many people have toward the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. (And while it might be a fork of FreeBSD, the developers would rather call it a spork, instead.) NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X. The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design. You can watch a recording of the announcement as well as a longer introduction linked from Phoronix's story.

Comments

Re:launchd not as bad as systemd

[PPH]

It's not about saving 5 seconds. Its about not having a registry. Windows users and admins are stamping their little feet because no registry. And its about writing and installing start/stop scripts. Shell scripts. Windows doesn't have (practical) shell scripts. Windows is not made up of lots of little single purpose utilities than can be piped together, call other shell scripts or executables, handle I/O and return values. And all without having to worry about whether the utility was implemented as a binary executable or a script. And you can read and process logs (text logs) using shell scripts. You can raise alarms or run special handlers based on the contents of those logs.

If the goal of systemd creators is to slowly move users back to Windows, these are all capabilities that need to be eliminated. So UNIX/Linux users can't use them as reasons not to move.