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There really hasn't been that much forking. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD and Darwin being the only existing operating systems. On top of that, they ar
by hvs 10y ago
There really hasn't been that much forking. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD and Darwin being the only existing operating systems. On top of that, they are complete operating systems with a user environment and kernel. You can't directly compare them to "Linux" which is only a kernel. You could more accurately compare them to Linux distributions (FreeBSD <=> Ubuntu). When looked at that way, the "fractured" community looks less like BSD and more like Linux.
- Esau 10y agoI don't think it is proper to consider Darwin a BSD fork. My understanding is that it is a Mack kernel with elements borrowed from BSD.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y agoIt's not a "fork" per se, but it is reasonable to describe Darwin as a member of the BSD family tree, descended largely from FreeBSD. My understanding, based on my memory and the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU) is that the XNU kernel was built out of Mach, but then had 4.3BSD grafted on to provide a normal-looking UNIX API, which was later upgraded using FreeBSD. But it isn't a normal BSD, certainly; Darwin still shows its Mach heritage in the way it does process management and message passing.
- JdeBP 10y agoConsider this one case study in the similarities of XNU, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD: * http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/350824/5132 http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/350824/5132