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Apple gave up on the serious server market ages ago, especially the enterprise market. What else other than Linux are they gonna use? Windows?

Maybe BSD would fit better with their lineage, but Linux has far better enterprise vendor support.

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It’s not unreasonable from the outside to think a custom server-tuned version of Darwin would make sense for Apple’s in-house server needs.

The reality of Apple internal systems: Things are mostly stuck together with duct tape. There is no Temple of Purity.

It's a beautiful fantasy, though.

It shows.

To be honest, I have yet to see a company where internal things are not mostly stuck together with duct tape.

Probably Google?

Doubtful. Even their customer products used different OS. It’s probably a controlled mess.

There is that meme about trying to get something into production at Google. And I thought nothing's worse than Facebook.

But why would they spend any energy on developing and maintaining Darwin for that purpose when Linux is already there and free?

Yeah, maybe in some parallel reality Apple poured a ton of effort into Darwin as a standalone platform and made it a great server OS. It's hard to imagine nowadays, but there was a time when it seemed like it might not be such a fantasy. It's probably still technically possible, but I have a hard time seeing how it makes sense for them.

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