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Usenix: Darwin Welcomed by BSD Community
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Tue Jun 08, 1999 07:53 AM
from the stuff-to-read dept.
from the stuff-to-read dept.
An anonymous submission tells us that
MacCentral has a story about the start of the annual Usenix conference, where Apple's Darwin Open Source OS reportedly received a warm welcome as a new member of the BSD operating system family.
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Usenix: Darwin Welcomed by BSD Community
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It would be nice... but not a sound business move (Score:3)
1) Apple makes money from making boxes, not software: The bulk of Apple's earnings come from the boxes it sells. Making their OS available to Wintel machines would cut into those revenues.
2) MacOS X on Wintel makes Apple compete with MS directly: Ok, they are already competitors in a way, but this will bring that competition to a different level. The Mac relies on MS Office suit to make their platform more attractive by making documents from Mac Office compatible with documents from Windose Office. They cannot afford to lose MS as a developer of their platform. At least now.
3) Maintaining two flavors of the OS is costly: Their R&D budget will pretty much double in order to maintain and develop an Intel version of their OS.
This been said, there are "rumors" that Apple is secretly continuing development of an Intel version of MacOS X Server. This is very likely since until last year there were builds of the OS made for Intel and PPC as well.
The Intel version was quietly discontinued after MS announced their support of the Mac at the famous Macworld keynote that year. I would not be surprised if MS had something to do with halting OS X Server development on Intel since it competes directly with NT Server.
Comments to this posting are welcome...
Re:Will this stuff eventually be ported to x86 ?? (Score:3)
Apple has been, shall we say, dismal in carrying out that promise. They proceded to scrap Rhapsody for Intel, then Yellow Box for Mac OS 8.5 in favor of Carbon, then Yellow Box for Windows. So, now, Yellow Box developers have nothing to write for except Mac OS X Server. I wouldn't exactly call that cross-platform.
How has Apple violated its promises? Let me count that ways: OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Yellow Box for Windows, Rhapsody, Display PostScript, QuickDraw 3D, eWorld, six-slot G3s, Pippin, Copland, Gershwin,
You'll pardon me if I tell you that my team is now working on Linux.
Re:Advertising (Score:4)
Re:Advertising (Score:3)
Vulcan wrote:
The story doesn't mention it. However, about half the userland code is from NetBSD, and Apple have supplied improvements and changes which have been integrated back into NetBSD. If OpenBSD track the NetBSD userland then those changes are probably in OpenBSD as well.
Apple are planning (or already have) used code from the FreeBSD kernel in the mach kernel. I assume this is to get ideas and possible implementations, rather than simple cut-n-paste. As Apple's engineers refine those ideas and implementations (where refinement is possible, obviously, FreeBSD already has a very good kernel) those refinements will be fed back to FreeBSD (from which the other BSDs can grab them). Again, this probably won't be a simple cut-n-paste job, but more a "We were able to get x% speed up here by doing x, y, and z. Here's diffs, so you can reimplement it in your code".
N