On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 1:23 PM, aki <aki275@googlemail.com> wrote:
Stripping down Apple’s products and history may tell us a bit about the magic; innovation and revolution. Most of Apple’s software is based on Free Software developed at universities by taxpayers money. The core Apple software – Mac OS– comes from BSD. It is developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California, Berkeley. Darvin is the base of Mac OS X which is built on top of XNU kernel. XNU Kernel is combination of Mach, BSD and other free software. Mach, the micro kernel, was not developed by Apple; it was another university project started at Carnegie Mellon University.
Apple acknowledges that the OS X kernel is based on FreeBSD & Mach: http://images.apple.com/macosx/technology/docs/L416017A_UNIX_TB_FF.pdf Avie Tevanian, who was one of the key developers of Mach, led the OS development efforts at NeXT and later Apple. Btw, the lead developer of the Mach Project, Rick Rashid, heads Microsoft Research Operations (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/rick/).
Nice business model. Borrow as much as you can from university projects; student’s toil and taxpayer’s money. But don’t give anything back. Use it to create an airtight compartment where every right to your customers and developers is refused.
I understand GCD (http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#grandcentral) is making its way into the FreeBSD source tree (http://wiki.freebsd.org/GCD). ~gms