Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:10:19 -0400
From:      Garance A Drosehn <gad@FreeBSD.org>
To:        "Garry" <tbcrew@gmail.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: Is this bunk.
Message-ID:  <p06240800c89793bcd18c@[128.113.124.121]>
In-Reply-To: <008c01cb425a$2603bc60$720b3520$@com>
References:  <008c01cb425a$2603bc60$720b3520$@com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 1:25 AM +0100 8/23/10, Garry wrote:
>
>Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor
>lock-in), 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.

Mac OS is the Mach kernel, plus a userland and unix libraries which
are very much BSD-ish.  They pulled in from all three major BSD
projects (NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD).  On top of that they have
their GUI layer, which is Quartz instead of X11, and the
development environment which is based on InterfaceBuilder (from
NeXTSTEP days) and Objective-C.  The Objective-C api's are called
"Cocoa".

Which is to say, if you're counting lines-of-code than most of
MacOS is *not* from any BSD.  The parts which did come from the
BSD's are available as source from Apple (in the project called
Darwin).  If we don't "get much out of Apple", it's because we
aren't looking through their source code, and that would not be
the fault of Apple.

They make sure we can't get much out of their work at the Mach
kernel, Quartz, and Cocoa layers, but then they can't get
anything out of us for those layers either.  So, I don't see
what the complaint is.

They've also contributed to a number of other open-source
projects, projects which have been BSD or GNU licensed.

>Also, Windows uses  (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking
>for instance.

This is true.  (or at least it definitely used to be true, I
have no idea if Vista and Windows7 are still using the BSD
networking stack).

So you're saying that you would prefer that Microsoft wrote
their own networking stack, which everyone else in the world
would be *required* to deal with, instead of using a network
stack which was already known and tested?

>Having seen how BSD 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.

That is your choice, of course.  And, well, I don't care.  All
I care is how I feel based on my work in the BSD's.  I'm happy
with how my work has been used.  I'm happy to keep contributing,
either with code or with donations to help others to produce
quality BSD-licensed open-source code.

BSD-licensing is probably not appropriate for all projects, but
it works well for the kinds of projects that I tend to work on.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =               drosehn@rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer               or   gad@FreeBSD.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;             Troy, NY;  USA



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p06240800c89793bcd18c>