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NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.
by vetinari 10y ago
NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.
- JdeBP 10y agoscreen was posted to net.sources in March 1987, under the name BSD screen manager. It made it to comp.sources.unix in August 1987 (v10i095), and was BSD multi-screen manager. Linux did not exist at the time.
- simonh 10y agoSamba, bash, screen and autofs all predate Linux and most of the rest were either initially developed on others unixes or at least at a time when Linux was far away from its current dominance. The idea that modern OSX relies in any material way on Linux is simply obviously false to anyone with a basic understanding of the history of UNIX. Linux succeeded due to its compatibility with this rich ecosystem of software, not the other way around.
- vetinari 10y agoAt the time, GNU had a problem: they had almost complete userland, but no kernel. That meant, that you needed some other expensive system to run the GNU software. Hurd was just around the corner, for years. What Linux changed that it opened the GNU software to much wider audience. You didn't need an expensive Sun workstation, cheap (relatively, at the time) PC was enough. With the Linux kernel and GNU software, you had a complete, usable system, that anybody could use. Many people did, and they contributed back. The development accelerated. So technically, no, OSX doesn't rely on Linux-the-kernel. But it benefited by the increased exposure GNU software got. (Samba is about a year younger than Linux-the-kernel.)