On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 01:25:34AM +0100, Garry wrote: > This is a conversation held on a UK group page, can you confirm or deny this > as twaddle. > Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor lock-in),
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X#History and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU It's a Mach-based kernel, with parts of FreeBSD's and NetBSD's userland. > they do give a little back to BSDs, but have made sure that BSDs can't get > much off of them, but they can get a lot out of BSD. Apple is a big user of and contributor to the LLVM project [http://llvm.org/] to create a modular and reusable compiler and toolchain with a BSD-like license. See e.g. http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/20/apples_other_open_secret_the_llvm_complier.html > Also, Windows uses (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking for > instance. No. See http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/7357 > Having seen how BDS license software has been used, to create highly tied > in, almost crippled proprietary software, I do not feel that I can support > software developed under such licenses. FreeBSD still exists. And so do NetBSD and OpenBSD. If someone wants to use BSD-licensed code, great. But if that company then decides not to contribute back they are not so smart. If they change the code but to not contribute back changes, the original developers don't know about it, nor can they merge it with their own developments. So over time the code-bases will diverge, and the company in question has to do more and more maintenance on that code. The crux of the matter is that if you don't contribute back you'll lose the advantage of open-source development and its community. Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
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