3 ms·
"stole BSD and Tivo-ized it" Please leave your GPL zealotry at home. This is not what NeXT was.
by feld 10y ago
"stole BSD and Tivo-ized it"
Please leave your GPL zealotry at home. This is not what NeXT was.
- roblabla 10y agoWell it kind of is. A modified BSD kernel (open source, called darwin) that can't run without heavy modifications on non-apple hardware, with lots of proprietary libraries bolted in. So they effectively took an open source software and made it hard to use outside their own hardware. So unless I'm missing something, macOS is basically a "tivoized" BSD. I agree though that NeXT didn't "steal BSD". BSD is liberally licensed, so NeXT was perfectly within their rights to use it. Legally speaking, I don't think they even needed to open source their fork.
- feld 10y agoThe XNU kernel is not a BSD kernel, it's a Mach kernel. There may be some BSD code in it (the unfinished net80211 wifi stack for iOS, ipfw/pf firewall, MAC framework, some things bolted on to make it traditional unix-y), but it's not a BSD kernel.