Comment by daneel_w
10 months ago
Common misconception. It is not. The kernel is XNU, and the OS base is Darwin which has some BSD parts in it, and some of the userland came directly from FreeBSD (though heavily modified).
10 months ago
Common misconception. It is not. The kernel is XNU, and the OS base is Darwin which has some BSD parts in it, and some of the userland came directly from FreeBSD (though heavily modified).
You’re not actually disagreeing with the OPs statement though. And they’re technically right too.
The problem is that all the user facing stuff in macOS isn’t BSD. It’s Apples proprietary APIs. So while macOS was originally and technically based on BSD, almost none of that is exposed to their users.
So they’re technically correct that macOS / Next was based on BSD. But also completely wrong to recommend macOS as a comparison to OpenBSD.
macOS was originally based on OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP was based on NeXTSTEP which was based on 4.3 and later 4.4.
BSD stuff has a complicated history due to the lawsuits in the 1990s.
NetBSD and FreeBSD were based on 386BSD. OpenBSD was a fork of NetBSD by one of the NetBSD founders (Theo deRaadt)...
It’s not even as clear cut as that because there’s FreeBSD and NetBSD code in XNU too.
Also OpenStep is an API rather than an OS. So macOS contains both NextStep and OpenStep code.
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