...the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was fundamentally op

...the release of the Mac OS X operating system, which was essentially a rebranded version of NeXTSTEP UNIX. Because Mac OS X was UNIX, it was fundamentally open... I truly appreciate the UNIX foundation and heritage of OSX, but "fundamentally open" is not a phrase I have ever associated with either or with UNIX. OSX is UNIX the way AIX, Irix, Solaris, HPUX, etc. are (were) UNIX. None of these are open in any meaningful sense (Solaris being an exception, but that's relatively recent.) The author seems to under the impression that because OSX is UNIX, it's suddenly in the same category of openness as the BSDs and Linux. To tech-minded people in the 2000s, Apple was no longer this closed, proprietary, expensive tinker toy. They were a decent UNIX workstation manufacturer that fostered openness. UNIX workstation? Yes. Fostering openness? No. The Apple of the 00's was essentially, and arguable remains, a closed, proprietary, expensive, consumer oriented UNIX workstation. But since then, it seems as if Apple has continually made decisions to move back in time to the 1990s. Rather than adopting open standards in their operating systems, they started focusing on developing their own, intended to work within their own ecosystem only. Maybe I'm missing the point. There certainly are Apple hardware changes and trends that I've not been happy about. I also recognize that there are software changes and standards deviations that are unfortunate. However, the idea that Apple was somehow a bastion of openness, and that their OS was open and now isn't seems inaccurate.