http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5610
A penguin's-eye look at Apple's OS X. "OS X is built on Darwin, an open-source implementation of BSD on a Mach kernel. So now every new Mac is a Trojan horse that arrives with an invisible army of UNIX experts. Regardless of the technical and religious differences that separate the many breeds of UNIX, expertise at one ports well to another: from Solaris to HP-UX to AIX to Linux to BSD to Darwin and OS X. If you want to hack, the environment is there--so are the tools and the community. Put another way, OS X gives us the first popular desktop OS that fits into a prevailing Linux environment and also into the prevailing marketplace. On the bottom, it's UNIX. On the top, it runs Microsoft Office and the whole Adobe suite. This has its appeals. In iDevGames.com, Aaron Hillegass writes: "Tomorrow I will get on a plane. I'll have my PowerBook with me. On that flight, I can write Cocoa apps, PHP-based web sites, Tomcat web applications, AppleScripts or Perl scripts. I can use Project Builder, Emacs or vi. I'll have my choice of MySQL or PostgreSQL to use as a back-end database. I'll use Apache as my web server. And it is all free! If I'm willing to spend a little cash, I can also run Word or Photoshop. I may even watch a DVD on the flight. " The social effects of OS X on the Open Source community were already apparent at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July 2001, when slab-like Macintosh G4 Titanium laptops seemed to be everywhere. At one Jabber meeting, four out of the seven attendees tapped away on TiBooks, including Jabber's creator, Jeremie Miller. Terminal windows were scattered across his screen. When we asked what he was doing, he replied, ``compiling code while I catch up on some e-mail''. " -- William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
