Does anybody know how jobs decided to base next on open source code (bsd)? It seems sort of antithetical to everything he stood for.
Next and Microsoft both sought to hire him, and he eventually went on to be in charge of the OS at Next and later Apple.
One of the topics he covered in the interview was how Next (and Apple) decided to use and contribute back to open sourced software at the lower levels of their stack.
He also covers what it was like to work for Steve Jobs.
NeXT was never about UNIX, rather the foundation libraries, UI Builder and everything that was possible to do with Objective-C, including writing device drivers.
UNIX compatibility was a way to embrace the software of the blooming market of UNIX workstation startups, and fill a checkmark on the requirements list.
I'd wager it was far more expeditious to develop on top of a professional-grade OS than to start over from scratch. He wanted to sell high-end hardware, and it's hard to do that with a primitive operating system.
Anyway, interesting question, would also like to know how that decision was made.
NeXT tried to get away with a closed-source fork of GCC for Objective C, but eventually backed down under legal threat.
If there's one thing companies don't like, it's uncertainty - and the whole GPLv3 discussion gave them exactly that. They needed an alternative - and placed their bets on the more liberally licensed LLVM project.
In late 80's there were multiple projects that attemped to build unix-like system on top of Mach (what essentially is academic project) out of these NeXT/OS X is the only one still really relevant. Another such project was OSF/1, which also took the way of running essentially all of real unix kernel space as one big Mach thread with code derived from BSD, this became DEC/Compaq/HP(E) Tru64 and all other systems build on this OSF/1 base never really worked with sufficient performance. (And for Tru64 on it's original Alpha platform Mach is slightly weird choice as the CPU essentially comes with it's own "microkernel" in microcode/firmware).
https://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/mach...