Although there's little to no doubt that Linux was evaluated for Rhapsody (and probably rejected for licensing reasons), another explanation is simply that Free

Although there's little to no doubt that Linux was evaluated for Rhapsody (and probably rejected for licensing reasons), another explanation is simply that Free and NetBSD represented a more direct upgrade path from NeXTSTEP's existing 4.3BSD codebase. Since the goal was to bring NS into the Apple ecosystem and explicitly not to create a new OS altogether it would make for the obvious choice.