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Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

Are you referring to NeXTSTEP? Darwin? I don't think they've ever tried to hide it.

NeXTSTEP was openly Unix, based on BSD and Mach. NeXT workstations were specifically designed with computer scientists and researchers that were familiar with Unix systems in mind.

http://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-100/

"Beneath the easy-to-use interface of Mac OS X is a rock-solid, UNIX foundation."

Granted, it doesn't explicitly list BSD there, though I think it's relatively well-known history, at least among people who care.

What makes you describe it as a "rip-off"? I get the impression you feel that Apple is trying to hide something, or did something improper. Would you elaborate on what you're getting at?

Edit to add: Minor note. FreeBSD dates back to 1992, while NeXTSTEP development started before October, 1988. Both share code from BSD.

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Yes but IIRC most of the userland and many of the libraries are from FreeBSD.

They do not hide that they are from BSD. man pages start with, for example,

    LS(1)    BSD General Commands Manual    LS(1)

and end with

    BSD      May 19, 2002                     BSD

Also, running strings on binaries such as cp or mv, "FreeBSD" is one of the first strings.

I don't think one can demand or expect more from a project that uses BSD-licensed userland (for gnu tools, one would expect '--help' to show the gnu heritage, but as far as I am aware, BSD tools typically don't have a 'help' feature)

Okay :) For the sake of my laziness in not wanting to look it up and argument I'll grant that. :) I'm still unclear what rms_returns is getting at. I've never gotten the impression that Apple (or NeXTSTEP) has ever tried to hide its BSD roots. For example, here's an article from MacWorld in 2001.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1001970/21osx-unix.html

Apple used to prominently advertise its Unix heritage:

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null"

http://www.mackungfu.org/vintage-os-x-ad-emphasises-unix-pow...

Here's another page from Apple describing its open source history.

"Major components of Mac OS X, including the UNIX core, are made available under Apple’s Open Source license"

http://www.apple.com/opensource/

Oh, and while I was looking for BSD/Unix references on apple.com, I found some info at Apple talking about FreeBSD:

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...

"The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. BSD variants in general are derived (sometimes indirectly) from 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 from the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley."

The BSD license is also incredibly permissive. I could understand anger or frustration or some negative feelings if Apple were taking some kind of credit for Unix or perhaps hiding its Unix history or something else nefarious. I just don't see that, though. I don't think the "rip-off" phrase is really in any way warranted. If you do, I'm legitimately interested in knowing why you think so. Likewise, if you think I've misrepresented something here, or if I've interpreted something unfairly, I'm happy to be corrected.

As for acknowledging that aspects of it are based on FreeBSD, I think it's pretty clear that Apple has, right in the Apple documentation.

Perhaps some people would like Apple to more prominently promote the BSD/Unix connection. I think Apple would if they thought it was useful for promoting macOS. However, the majority of their users interact with the GUI. The features of the GUI and applications are the aspects of macOS that attract most people. And if you want to take this into "but Apple stole the GUI from Xerox PARC" territory, you can find plenty of discussion for that elsewhere on the internet :) We're pretty far afield from the post (which makes no mention of Unix or BSD, and mentions macOS and developer each only once) as it is.

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