Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 16:02:46 +0100 (CET) From: Sidsel Jensen <none@purple--hamster.dk.lh.bsd-dk.dk> To: osx@bsd-dk.dk Subject: facts...
<snip>
Q. Why is Darwin based on BSD UNIX?
A. There are several reasons for this. The first one is historical. Mac OS
X draws a lot of its code base from a system called OPENSTEP, created by
NeXT Software, which Apple bought in 1997. OPENSTEP and its predecessor,
NEXTSTEP, were based on 4.3 BSD. BSD has always had a rich academic
developer community behind it, and while much of the original BSD UNIX was
not free, its source code was available to anyone who obtained a license
for it. The wide development community that arose to support BSD
contributed to many of the ideas that drive today's open source community.
That community also facilitated a great deal of research, including work
to put BSD on Mach at Carnegie Mellon University-code that eventually
found its way to NeXT and now to Apple.
Second, BSD is widely respected as clean, robust, and maintainable code.
There remains a strong developer community that knows the code base very
well and continues the work started at UC Berkeley. In addition, the BSD
license is very open, which has made it easy for us to leverage its
compelling core technology to enhance the Mac OS.
Best of all, as a result of making this choice, Apple is now an active
participant in the BSD community. This allows us to make sure that the
capabilities important to Mac users are added to BSD. Being part of the
BSD community also gives us access to excellent peer review and keeps us
on a path to adopt and contribute to open standards, the benefits of which
are well known to our developers. The BSD community has been extremely
supportive of Apple since we first approached NetBSD, FreeBSD, and others
about doing a better job of sharing code. That happened even before we
announced Darwin. Now we're pleased to have become an even more active
participant in the community.
Q. Where does Darwin fit into the BSD family?
A. The purpose of Darwin is to provide the core system software for Mac OS
X. It is not designed to be an alternative to other excellent BSD options
such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Darwin is simply BSD tweaked in ways
we think will help Apple deliver the next great version of the Mac OS. We
should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences
(such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible
as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform).
</snip>
mvh. Sidsel
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