12 ms·

Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran

Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that. Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return.

skissane 2y ago
> Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux XNU is only partially open sourced – the core is open sourced, but significant chunks are missing, e.g. APFS filesystem. Forking Linux might have legally compelled them to make all kernel modules open source–which while that would likely be a positive for humanity, isn't what Apple wants to do
- mattl 2y ago
  At one point NeXT considered distributing GCC under the GPL with some proprietary parts linked at first boot into the binary. Stallman after speaking with lawyers rejected this. https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc/Wh... Look for "NeXT" on this page.
  - leoh 2y ago
    Stallman’s insistence that a judge would side with him is pretty arrogant in my opinion; eg looking at Oracle v. Google decades later and how folks deciding the case seemed to be confused about technical matters.
    - skissane 2y ago
      I don't think it was "arrogant" – if you read the link, he explains that he originally thought differently, but he changed his mind based on what his lawyer told him. I don't think you can label a non-lawyer "arrogant" for accepting the legal advice of their own attorney – whether that advice is correct or not can be debated, but it isn't arrogant for someone to trust the correctness of their own lawyer's advice.
threeseed 2y ago
1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. 2) Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. Especially when so many of the dev team was involved in sorting out Apple's engineering and tech strategy as well as all the features needed to make it more Mac like. 3) Apple was still using PowerPC at the time which NeXTStep supported but Linux did not. It took IBM a couple of years to get Linux running.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. And even if they had had the money and time, Avie Tevanian¹ was a principal designer and engineer of Mach². There was no NeXTSTEP-based path where the Mach-derived XNU would not be at the core of Apple's new OS family. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avie_Tevanian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avie_Tevanian ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
- kergonath 2y ago
  > Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. I broadly agree, but it is more nuanced than that. They actually had experience with Linux. Shortly before acquiring NeXT, they did the opposite of what you mentioned and ported Linux to the Mach microkernel for their MkLinux OS. It was cancelled at some point, but had things turned a bit differently, it could have ended up more important than it actually did.
- bigger_cheese 2y ago
  >1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting. I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc. Things I can remember from back in those days: - LILO to GRUB boot loader changes - Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out. - Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA - Introduction of /sys - Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website) - Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices - Signalfd - Splice/VMsplice - Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper" Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example. Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.
wtallis 2y ago
There was never a right time for Apple to make such a switch. NeXTSTEP predates Linux, and when it was adapted into Mac OS X, Apple couldn't afford a wholesale kernel replacement project on top of everything else, and Linux in the late 1990s was far from being an obviously superior choice. Once they were a few versions in to OS X and solidly established as the most successful UNIX-like OS for consumer PCs, switching to a Linux base would have been an expensive risk with very little short-term upside. Maybe if Apple had been able to keep classic MacOS going five years longer, or Linux had matured five years earlier, the OS X transition could have been very different. But throwing out XNU in favor of a pre-2.6 Linux kernel wouldn't have made much sense.
- swatson741 2y ago
  I agree with all of this. Moreover depending on what Torvalds chooses to do Apple may have ended up with a more expensive XNU in the end which would have been a disaster. Although I think Apple can deal with Torvalds just fine who really knows how that would have played out.
  - inopinatus 2y ago
    It would not be fine. It would have never been fine. It would have been a titanic clash of egos and culture, producing endless bickering and finger-pointing, with little meeting of minds. Apple runs the most vertically integrated general systems model outside of mainframes. Linux and its ecosystem represent the least. In any case, as others have noted, the timeline here w.r.t nextstep is backwards.
- lunarlull 2y ago
  Making a switch is one thing, but using Linux from the start for OS X would have made more sense. The only reason that didn't happen is because of Jobs' attachment to his other baby. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was a choice made from vanity and ego over technical merit.
  - andrewf 2y ago
    This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.
GianFabien 2y ago
Back in the days when Apple acquired NeXT, Linux was undergoing lots of development and wasn't well established. Linux being a monolithic kernel didn't offer the levels of compartmentalization that Mach did. As things now stand, FreeBSD represents many of the benefits of Darwin and the open source nature of Linux. If you seek a more secure environment without Apple's increasing levels of lock-in, then FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) merit consideration for deployment.
- khana 2y ago
  [dead]
- finnjohnsen2 2y ago
  Is the driver support fit for using FreeBSD as a desktop OS these days? Last I tried (~10 years ago) I gave up and I assumed FreeBSD was a Server OS, because I couldn't for the life of me get Nvidia drivers working in native resolution. I don't recall specifics but Bluetooth was problematic also.
  - WD-42 2y ago
    I don't think so. Here's a report from this month: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/february-2025-laptop-support-and-usability-project-update/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/february-2025-laptop-supp... Looks like (some) laptops might sleep and wifi is on the way! (with help from Linux drivers)
- laurencerowe 2y ago
  Isn’t FreeBSD a monolithic kernel? I don’t believe it provides the compartmentalisation that you talk about. As I understand it Mach was based on BSD and was effectively a hybrid with much of the existing BSD kernel running as a single big task under the microkernel. Darwin has since updated the BSD kernel under microkernel with the current developments from FreeBSD.
  - TickleSteve 2y ago
    Mach was never based on BSD, it replaced it. Mach is the descendant of the Accent and Aleph kernels. BSD came into the frame for the userland tools. "Mach was developed as a replacement for the kernel in the BSD version of Unix," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)) Interestingly, MkLinux was the same type of project but for Linux instead of BSD (i.e. Linux userland with Mach kernel).
linguae 2y ago
Interestingly enough, Apple did contribute to porting Linux to PowerPC Macs in the mid-1990s under the MkLinux project, which started in 1996 before Apple’s purchase of NeXT later that year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux I don’t think there was any work done on bringing the Macintosh GUI and application ecosystem to Linux. However, until the purchase of NeXT, Apple already had the Macintosh environment running on top of Unix via A/UX (for 68k Macs) and later the Macintosh Application Environment for Solaris and HP-UX; the latter ran Mac OS as a Unix process. If I remember correctly, the work Apple did for creating the Macintosh Application Environment laid the groundwork for Rhapsody’s Blue Box, which later became Mac OS X’s Classic environment. It is definitely possible to imagine the Macintosh Application Environment being ported to MkLinux. The modern FOSS BSDs were also available in 1996, since this was after the settlement of the lawsuit affecting the BSDs. Of course, running the classic Mac OS as a process on top of Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, Windows NT, or some other contemporary OS was not a viable consumer desktop OS strategy in the mid 1990s, since this required workstation-level resources at a time when Apple was still supporting 68k Macs (Mac OS 8 ran on some 68030 and 68040 machines). This idea would’ve been more viable in the G3/G4 era, and by the 2000s it would have be feasible to give each classic Macintosh program its own Mac OS process running on top of a modern OS, but I don’t think Apple would have made it past 1998 without Jobs’ return, not to mention that the NeXT purchase brought other important components to the Mac such as Cocoa, IOKit, Quartz (the successor to Display PostScript) and other now-fundamental technologies.
- CharlesW 2y ago
  > I don’t think there was any work done on bringing the Macintosh GUI and application ecosystem to Linux. QTML (which became the foundation of the Carbon API) was OS agnostic. The Windows versions of QuickTime and iTunes used QTML, and in an alternate universe Apple could've empowered developers to bring Mac OS apps to Windows and Linux with a more mature version of that technology.
- threeseed 2y ago
  Completely forget about MkLinux. The timing is fascinating. MkLinux was released in February 1996 whilst Copland got officially cancelled in August 1996. So it's definitely conceivable that internally they were considering to just give up on the Copland microkernel and run it all on Linux. And maybe this was a legitimate third option to BeOS and NeXT that was never made public.
askvictor 2y ago
Diverse systems are more resilient. It's probably a good thing for IT in a general sense, even if it's not the most efficient
toast0 2y ago
Based on how often they pull in updated bits from FreeBSD (pretty much never), an Apple fork of Linux would be more or less Linux 2.4 today. I don't know what the loss that open source suffers is in this context? I don't think Apple would need to spend less time or money on their kernel grafted ontop of Linux 2.4 vs their kernel grafted on top of FreeBSD 4.4
- WD-42 2y ago
  Because presumably the GPL would force them to release their modifications. Apple gets/got away with leeching off the BSDs because of the permissive license.
  - zigzag312 2y ago
    A bit off topic, but is there any data or estimates of how often big companies use modified versions GPL software/libraries for their web services without releasing their modifications?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - toast0 2y ago
    They release their kernel source more or less timely without the GPL.
surajrmal 2y ago
Why would we want more of a monoculture? We've put so many eggs in one basket already. I hope we see more diversity in kernels, not further consolidation. Taken a different way, it feels similar to suggesting Apple should rebase safari on chromium.
hypercube33 2y ago
Keep in mind they were also looking at BeOS which is more real time and notably not unix/Linux. I wish I lived in the timeline that they went with it as I'm a huge Be fan.
palata 2y ago
Seen differently, I think it's great that there is yet another kernel being maintained out there. Imagine if Apple decided to open source Darwin: wouldn't that be a big win for open source?
- chuckadams 2y ago
  The core of it always has been open source: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
phendrenad2 2y ago
Control is important. Apple has never had to fight with Torvalds or IBM or Microsoft over getting something added to the kernel. Just look at the fiasco when Microsoft wanted to add a driver for their virtualization system to the kernel. Also, one thing you'll notice about big companies - they know that not only is time valuable, worst-case time is important too. If someone in an open-source ecosystem CAN delay your project, that's almost as bad as if they regularly DO delay your project. This is why big companies like Google tend to invent everything themselves, I.E. Google may have "invented Kubernetes" (really, an engineer at Google uninvolved with the progenitor of K8s - Borg - invented it based on Borg), but they still use Borg, which everyone Xoogler here likes to say is "not as good as k8s". Yet they still use it. Because it gives them full control, and no possibility of outsiders slowing them down.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that. They have a long history with XNU and BSD. And Linux has s GPL license which might not suit Apple. >Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return. They share a lot of code with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Which are open source. And Darwin is open source, too. So there's no loss that open source suffers.
piuantiderp 2y ago
The world is better with multiple flavors instead of one bloated one.
mycall 2y ago
One must consider the loss of control moving to Linux would bring. Even Google is reconsidering with fuchsia inline to replace Linux on Android.
95014_refugee 2y ago
It would never have worked. So many of the things that owning xnu has made possible would never have happened on top of Linux. The things you can do when you know each and every customer of the stack, and you all belong to the same business with common objectives and leadership direction just can’t be done in the open-source context.

skissane 2y ago

> Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux XNU is only partially open sourced – the core is open sourced, but significant chunks are missing, e.g. APFS filesystem. Forking Linux might have legally compelled them to make all kernel modules open source–which while that would likely be a positive for humanity, isn't what Apple wants to do

mattl 2y ago
At one point NeXT considered distributing GCC under the GPL with some proprietary parts linked at first boot into the binary. Stallman after speaking with lawyers rejected this. https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL https://sourceforge.net/p/clisp/clisp/ci/default/tree/doc/Wh... Look for "NeXT" on this page.
- leoh 2y ago
  Stallman’s insistence that a judge would side with him is pretty arrogant in my opinion; eg looking at Oracle v. Google decades later and how folks deciding the case seemed to be confused about technical matters.
  - skissane 2y ago
    I don't think it was "arrogant" – if you read the link, he explains that he originally thought differently, but he changed his mind based on what his lawyer told him. I don't think you can label a non-lawyer "arrogant" for accepting the legal advice of their own attorney – whether that advice is correct or not can be debated, but it isn't arrogant for someone to trust the correctness of their own lawyer's advice.

threeseed 2y ago

1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. 2) Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. Especially when so many of the dev team was involved in sorting out Apple's engineering and tech strategy as well as all the features needed to make it more Mac like. 3) Apple was still using PowerPC at the time which NeXTStep supported but Linux did not. It took IBM a couple of years to get Linux running.

CharlesW 2y ago
> Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. And even if they had had the money and time, Avie Tevanian¹ was a principal designer and engineer of Mach². There was no NeXTSTEP-based path where the Mach-derived XNU would not be at the core of Apple's new OS family. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avie_Tevanian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avie_Tevanian ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
kergonath 2y ago
> Apple had no money or time to invest in rewriting NeXTStep for a completely new kernel they had no experience in. I broadly agree, but it is more nuanced than that. They actually had experience with Linux. Shortly before acquiring NeXT, they did the opposite of what you mentioned and ported Linux to the Mach microkernel for their MkLinux OS. It was cancelled at some point, but had things turned a bit differently, it could have ended up more important than it actually did.
bigger_cheese 2y ago
>1) We are talking about the late 90s, well before Ubuntu, where Desktop Linux was pretty poor in terms of features and polish. I think it's hard to understate how much traction Linux had in the late 90's/ early 2000's. It felt like ground breaking stuff was happening pretty much all the time, major things were changing rapidly every release and it felt exciting and genuinely revolutionary to download updates and try out all the new things it really felt like you were on the bleeding edge, your system would break all the time but it was fun and exciting. I remember reading Slashdot daily being excited to try out every new distribution I'd see on distrowatch, I'd download and build kernels fairly regularly etc. Things I can remember from back in those days: - LILO to GRUB boot loader changes - Going from EXT2 to EXT3 and all the other experimental filesystems that kept coming out. - Sound system changing from OSS to ASLA - Introduction of /sys - Gentoo and all the memes (funroll-loops website) - Udev and being able to hotplug usb devices - Signalfd - Splice/VMsplice - Early wireless support and the cursed "ndiswrapper" Nowadays Linux is pretty stable and dare I say it "boring" (in a good way). It's probably mostly because I've gotten older and have way less free time to spend living on the bleeding edge. It feels like Linux has gone from something you had to wrestle with constantly to have a working system to a spot where nowadays everything "mostly works" out of the box. I can't remember last time I've had to cntrl + alt + backspace my desktop for example. Last major thing I can remember hearing about and being excited for was io_uring.

wtallis 2y ago

There was never a right time for Apple to make such a switch. NeXTSTEP predates Linux, and when it was adapted into Mac OS X, Apple couldn't afford a wholesale kernel replacement project on top of everything else, and Linux in the late 1990s was far from being an obviously superior choice. Once they were a few versions in to OS X and solidly established as the most successful UNIX-like OS for consumer PCs, switching to a Linux base would have been an expensive risk with very little short-term upside. Maybe if Apple had been able to keep classic MacOS going five years longer, or Linux had matured five years earlier, the OS X transition could have been very different. But throwing out XNU in favor of a pre-2.6 Linux kernel wouldn't have made much sense.

swatson741 2y ago
I agree with all of this. Moreover depending on what Torvalds chooses to do Apple may have ended up with a more expensive XNU in the end which would have been a disaster. Although I think Apple can deal with Torvalds just fine who really knows how that would have played out.
- inopinatus 2y ago
  It would not be fine. It would have never been fine. It would have been a titanic clash of egos and culture, producing endless bickering and finger-pointing, with little meeting of minds. Apple runs the most vertically integrated general systems model outside of mainframes. Linux and its ecosystem represent the least. In any case, as others have noted, the timeline here w.r.t nextstep is backwards.
lunarlull 2y ago
Making a switch is one thing, but using Linux from the start for OS X would have made more sense. The only reason that didn't happen is because of Jobs' attachment to his other baby. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was a choice made from vanity and ego over technical merit.
- andrewf 2y ago
  This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.

GianFabien 2y ago

Back in the days when Apple acquired NeXT, Linux was undergoing lots of development and wasn't well established. Linux being a monolithic kernel didn't offer the levels of compartmentalization that Mach did. As things now stand, FreeBSD represents many of the benefits of Darwin and the open source nature of Linux. If you seek a more secure environment without Apple's increasing levels of lock-in, then FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) merit consideration for deployment.

khana 2y ago
[dead]
finnjohnsen2 2y ago
Is the driver support fit for using FreeBSD as a desktop OS these days? Last I tried (~10 years ago) I gave up and I assumed FreeBSD was a Server OS, because I couldn't for the life of me get Nvidia drivers working in native resolution. I don't recall specifics but Bluetooth was problematic also.
- WD-42 2y ago
  I don't think so. Here's a report from this month: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/february-2025-laptop-support-and-usability-project-update/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/february-2025-laptop-supp... Looks like (some) laptops might sleep and wifi is on the way! (with help from Linux drivers)
laurencerowe 2y ago
Isn’t FreeBSD a monolithic kernel? I don’t believe it provides the compartmentalisation that you talk about. As I understand it Mach was based on BSD and was effectively a hybrid with much of the existing BSD kernel running as a single big task under the microkernel. Darwin has since updated the BSD kernel under microkernel with the current developments from FreeBSD.
- TickleSteve 2y ago
  Mach was never based on BSD, it replaced it. Mach is the descendant of the Accent and Aleph kernels. BSD came into the frame for the userland tools. "Mach was developed as a replacement for the kernel in the BSD version of Unix," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)) Interestingly, MkLinux was the same type of project but for Linux instead of BSD (i.e. Linux userland with Mach kernel).

linguae 2y ago

Interestingly enough, Apple did contribute to porting Linux to PowerPC Macs in the mid-1990s under the MkLinux project, which started in 1996 before Apple’s purchase of NeXT later that year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux I don’t think there was any work done on bringing the Macintosh GUI and application ecosystem to Linux. However, until the purchase of NeXT, Apple already had the Macintosh environment running on top of Unix via A/UX (for 68k Macs) and later the Macintosh Application Environment for Solaris and HP-UX; the latter ran Mac OS as a Unix process. If I remember correctly, the work Apple did for creating the Macintosh Application Environment laid the groundwork for Rhapsody’s Blue Box, which later became Mac OS X’s Classic environment. It is definitely possible to imagine the Macintosh Application Environment being ported to MkLinux. The modern FOSS BSDs were also available in 1996, since this was after the settlement of the lawsuit affecting the BSDs. Of course, running the classic Mac OS as a process on top of Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, Windows NT, or some other contemporary OS was not a viable consumer desktop OS strategy in the mid 1990s, since this required workstation-level resources at a time when Apple was still supporting 68k Macs (Mac OS 8 ran on some 68030 and 68040 machines). This idea would’ve been more viable in the G3/G4 era, and by the 2000s it would have be feasible to give each classic Macintosh program its own Mac OS process running on top of a modern OS, but I don’t think Apple would have made it past 1998 without Jobs’ return, not to mention that the NeXT purchase brought other important components to the Mac such as Cocoa, IOKit, Quartz (the successor to Display PostScript) and other now-fundamental technologies.

CharlesW 2y ago
> I don’t think there was any work done on bringing the Macintosh GUI and application ecosystem to Linux. QTML (which became the foundation of the Carbon API) was OS agnostic. The Windows versions of QuickTime and iTunes used QTML, and in an alternate universe Apple could've empowered developers to bring Mac OS apps to Windows and Linux with a more mature version of that technology.
threeseed 2y ago
Completely forget about MkLinux. The timing is fascinating. MkLinux was released in February 1996 whilst Copland got officially cancelled in August 1996. So it's definitely conceivable that internally they were considering to just give up on the Copland microkernel and run it all on Linux. And maybe this was a legitimate third option to BeOS and NeXT that was never made public.

askvictor 2y ago

Diverse systems are more resilient. It's probably a good thing for IT in a general sense, even if it's not the most efficient

toast0 2y ago

Based on how often they pull in updated bits from FreeBSD (pretty much never), an Apple fork of Linux would be more or less Linux 2.4 today. I don't know what the loss that open source suffers is in this context? I don't think Apple would need to spend less time or money on their kernel grafted ontop of Linux 2.4 vs their kernel grafted on top of FreeBSD 4.4

WD-42 2y ago
Because presumably the GPL would force them to release their modifications. Apple gets/got away with leeching off the BSDs because of the permissive license.
- zigzag312 2y ago
  A bit off topic, but is there any data or estimates of how often big companies use modified versions GPL software/libraries for their web services without releasing their modifications?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- toast0 2y ago
  They release their kernel source more or less timely without the GPL.

surajrmal 2y ago

Why would we want more of a monoculture? We've put so many eggs in one basket already. I hope we see more diversity in kernels, not further consolidation. Taken a different way, it feels similar to suggesting Apple should rebase safari on chromium.

hypercube33 2y ago

Keep in mind they were also looking at BeOS which is more real time and notably not unix/Linux. I wish I lived in the timeline that they went with it as I'm a huge Be fan.

palata 2y ago

Seen differently, I think it's great that there is yet another kernel being maintained out there. Imagine if Apple decided to open source Darwin: wouldn't that be a big win for open source?

chuckadams 2y ago
The core of it always has been open source: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu

phendrenad2 2y ago

Control is important. Apple has never had to fight with Torvalds or IBM or Microsoft over getting something added to the kernel. Just look at the fiasco when Microsoft wanted to add a driver for their virtualization system to the kernel. Also, one thing you'll notice about big companies - they know that not only is time valuable, worst-case time is important too. If someone in an open-source ecosystem CAN delay your project, that's almost as bad as if they regularly DO delay your project. This is why big companies like Google tend to invent everything themselves, I.E. Google may have "invented Kubernetes" (really, an engineer at Google uninvolved with the progenitor of K8s - Borg - invented it based on Borg), but they still use Borg, which everyone Xoogler here likes to say is "not as good as k8s". Yet they still use it. Because it gives them full control, and no possibility of outsiders slowing them down.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that. They have a long history with XNU and BSD. And Linux has s GPL license which might not suit Apple. >Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return. They share a lot of code with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Which are open source. And Darwin is open source, too. So there's no loss that open source suffers.

piuantiderp 2y ago

The world is better with multiple flavors instead of one bloated one.

mycall 2y ago

One must consider the loss of control moving to Linux would bring. Even Google is reconsidering with fuchsia inline to replace Linux on Android.

95014_refugee 2y ago

It would never have worked. So many of the things that owning xnu has made possible would never have happened on top of Linux. The things you can do when you know each and every customer of the stack, and you all belong to the same business with common objectives and leadership direction just can’t be done in the open-source context.