It's an operating system that runs server software. How does that not make it a "server OS"?

It runs a VPN service, an update service, it's largely based on OpenBSD, how are you defining what is and isn't this magical "server OS"?

Incidentally, I didn't actually need to purchase that, it just made my life easier. I was quite readily able to install OpenVPN on it via Homebrew and configure the pf rules without their GUI.

The only thing I couldn't do was to install the caching update service. Do you know of an alternative I could have used to update a network full of Macs? No mockery needed, just an answer will do fine - if you know.

> And Windows can operate as a server running all sorts of things like Active Directory, Exchange, etc. - that's because Microsoft bundles the software with it to allow it to do this, but the underlying operating system remains the same.

Actually, it seriously isn't - Windows Server has a hugely changed set of features compared to Windows on the desktop, from the kernel upwards. The software in question is tied heavily into every piece of the OS - there is almost no major component in Windows 10 that is exactly the same in its equivalent server build. This is very different from both OS X and Linux.

OS X is very much not designed to act as a permanently always-on server in a business-critical capacity - what I'd expect from a server OS. The fact that Apple sell a product called "server" doesn't change that, any more than that XAMPP exists for Windows 10.

To put it in a question - would you run your SaaS off of OS X?

If I understand correctly, non-Server editions of Windows have an artificial limit of 20 simultaneous incoming network connections. But I'm not sure if it's just an EULA thing, or it's only enforced in specific services (e.g. file/printer sharing, IIS), or if it's implemented at the network layer. If it's the latter, that would surely disqualify it from "server OS" status.