I haven't seen an official statement from Apple on this, but I believe OS X as we know it is possible only on a BSD foundation for legal, rather than technical, reasons. This is why--if I'm right--you will never see the OS X core moved to a Linux distro.
The GPL used by Linux is a bit too restrictive and "public" for Apple's purposes. For instance, the GPL won't allow you to modify open source code and then close the source, whereas the BSD license will. I don't have specific knowledge of Apple's decision process for choosing FreeBSD as the foundation for OS X, but I assume that at best Apple would have to walk on eggshells under the GPL, and at worst would have to completely restructure their business model.
I've seen well-known commentators make statements similar to yours, so maybe the answer is not this obvious. Anyone have the goods to confirm or refute my assumptions?
P.S.: Don't get it twisted--FreeBSD certainly has enough merits that the decision could have been based on technical considerations alone. From a stability standpoint, consider Netcraft's Uptime Survey. Of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime (time since last reboot) as of 25 July 2004, 1 runs Linux, 1 runs Windows, and the other 48 run a BSD variant. Not unassailable testimony, but still damn impressive.
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I haven't seen an official statement from Apple on this, but I believe OS X as we know it is possible only on a BSD foundation for legal, rather than technical, reasons. This is why--if I'm right--you will never see the OS X core moved to a Linux distro.
The GPL used by Linux is a bit too restrictive and "public" for Apple's purposes. For instance, the GPL won't allow you to modify open source code and then close the source, whereas the BSD license will. I don't have specific knowledge of Apple's decision process for choosing FreeBSD as the foundation for OS X, but I assume that at best Apple would have to walk on eggshells under the GPL, and at worst would have to completely restructure their business model.
I've seen well-known commentators make statements similar to yours, so maybe the answer is not this obvious. Anyone have the goods to confirm or refute my assumptions?
P.S.: Don't get it twisted--FreeBSD certainly has enough merits that the decision could have been based on technical considerations alone. From a stability standpoint, consider Netcraft's Uptime Survey. Of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime (time since last reboot) as of 25 July 2004, 1 runs Linux, 1 runs Windows, and the other 48 run a BSD variant. Not unassailable testimony, but still damn impressive.