BTW, do you know why they chose BSD rather than Linux for the basis of OS X?
I'd suggest that it has to do with Nextstep, which was the previous attempt to put Mac over unix. Apparently there are a lot of extensions to Unix underneath OSX prefaced with "ns".
BSD was the basis of NextStep, which was succeeded by OpenStep, which then became Rhapsody, which was the starting point for OS X.
Here's a reference: http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/history.html
It may also have to do with the fact that Linux is distributed under the
GPL and copyright to Linus Torvalds, both of which may have been some
legal issue somehow.
I think you mean trademark rather than copyright :) I have no idea about the licensing issues with them using the Linux kernel. Some of the features they would have needed to add might have been wrapped in "commercial sensitivity".
Apple does use a lot of GPL applications (eg GCC, Samba, Apache, and Safari is basically a tarted-up Mozilla), and they contribute a lot back to the open source community.
Hearing people grumble about customizing OSes, I'm real happy with the
unix philosophy of putting all configuration info in easily readable
and editable text files. I also use my D1h and F4 on manual all the time.
I agree with you there, but I don't like having to use a text editor to do it :) Actually all I really need most of the time is better documentation. Thankfully things are getting a lot better.
Cheers,
- Dave
http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/
