Der Flow hat da eine wundervolle Korinthenkacker-Diskussion aufgetan, Amit Singh:
- If you are an end-user, Mac OS X is very much Unix.
- If you are a user-space programmer, Mac OS X still provides a substantial amount of “Unixness”
- If you are a kernel programmer, very little of Mac OS X is Unix.
- If you are an operating system purist, Mac OS X is not Unix.
It’s a matter of public record that Mac OS X evolved substantially from NeXTStep, not Mac OS 9, so no “Unix retrofitting” went on here. NeXTStep, as is well known, was a BSD 4.3 based OS - it was ALWAYS “Unix at its core” and never had that capability “retrofitted” either since it never needed to. Yes, it did leverage Mach, but Mach is just a services layer (neither NextStep or Mac OS X ever used it in the pure “Microkernel / UX server” model) and OSF/1 (aka Digital UNIX) was never considered any less Unix-like for having also leveraged it. Amit states all of this in his “Brief history of Mac OS X” (http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/history.html) so it’s not like he doesn’t know these things, he’s just chosen to ignore his own writings for some inexplicable reason and now attempts to cast history in a completely different light. I really don’t understand why.
Erbsenzählerei, aber sehr interessante…
(via: the flow)