Why Darwin failed (2006)
synack.net
synack.net
https://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-59754.... https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/Sec...
Access to such source code is not nothing, and certainly seems more than just a marketing gimmick.
They clearly never helped to make it a usable standalone oss product, at all.
Just look at what the author said about breaking backwards compatibility upstream, with no regards to non Mac Darwin.
It’s melodramatic to call what Apple did a “marketing stunt”, but that code on its own is pretty useless.
Lots of things were under-supported or under-documented, and every release would break things in unexpected ways.
I don’t know if it was intentional, or a lack of priority, but I got tired of having to work so hard just to get my programs to compile.
C# had this issue for a long time as well. Any desktop app support outside of Windows is abysmal.
These languages don’t really bring anything groundbreaking to the table anyway. They just coat them in syntax sugar so you’ll stay hooked on their platform.
It’s much more sensible to write web apps and have them run in Electron or I guess alternatives, but you didn’t need me to say that.
I've been experimenting with ONVIF to create an IP camera that can be integrated with windows without the user having to install any additional software. I almost never touch windows and I must say that the experience has been very frustrating because things do not behave according to spec and I can't look at the source code to see what's actually happening.
Access to source code makes a world of difference. Otherwise, you're left guessing and the quality of your product will suffer because you end up doing "whatever works" under your circumstances. Under different circumstances that can break.
When Apple was trying to escape from its near death experience (imac era) they were super enthusiastic about open standards (JPEG, MP3, iCal, et al.). When I say "super enthusiastic" I mean to the point of Jobs touting that on stage.
Of course they also paid adobe and Microsoft for access to some of their very popular formats. They paid for USB and made one of the first, and as is usual for them, most strict and compliant, implementations. They were probably the first consumer 802.11 companies. As much as possible they wanted to talk to as many things as possible.
As they clawed their way back those standards were still OK (and still are -- Apple is actually pretty good at supporting open standards, better than most in my experience) but they didn't care as much about going off in their own direction again, and making those their defaults.
I’d be surprised if, in a perfect universe of their imagining, Apple wouldn’t fully embrace open source… because they don’t see much value in software other than integration. Their resistance to standards and openness now is almost entirely about protecting trade secrets. Which definitely has flaws! But it’s a substantial difference from Apple in the early 2000s where they couldn’t coherently tell a story about what was public or why.
You won't find any of it on the Mac OS System predecessors, nor on the Copland roadmap and early developer betas.
There are major OSS projects that were started by Apple, and plenty that weren't started by, but definitely get the bulk of their engineering from Apple, in public repositories.
Had it not been for the license change, clang would never had happened.
CUPS is another, it was ok but not great until Apple took it in and made it work with a ton of devices, and also make vendors wake up and support it. Now Windows has a much worse printing environment, and would do well to just adopt CUPS.
Also they don't contribute everything upstream, like the stable bitcode format used in watchOS, or the SafeC used in iBoot.
Apple hired the CUPS developer, that is why, again not started by them and they had to obey the license.
Windows a worse printing environment than CUPS? What a joke.
So where is that ton to it?
The point is what contributions they are doing in 2022.
Similarly libc++, etc.
GCC originally meant, GNU C Compiler and got renamed into GNU Compiler Collection exactly because it became a general platform to write compilers for the GNU ecosystem.
The irony that now GCC is far ahead of clang in ISO C++ support shows how much Apple and others care about upstream.
Let’s not forget that Jobs promised iChat would be opened for third parties to interoperate with, and never did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSCAR_protocol
Later it added XMPP and Yahoo IM support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messages_(Apple)#macOS_version
I am not some Apple-booster here. I use Franz, myself. But it was open. I don't have anything newer than 10.14 here so I can't talk about later versions.
D:
As far as hardware goes, Apple could reasonably charge a premium for a lot of Mac hardware: They were known for high end LCD, Speakers, they were ahead on USB, DVD, Firewire (...). But people don't care about the architecture of the CPU, they care about the speed it can do something, and PPC CPUs cost more than Intel or AMD by a vary large margin (I've always assumed whole-number factor?), and towards the end of the era PPC was also slower than the competitor. I'm not a business person, and obviously know nothing about Apple's financial or business plans, but I can't imagine that having to pay a huge premium for the most expensive part of a Mac (and having that also be both slower and hotter than the competition) was probably chewing out a huge amount of any profit margin than was manageable.
Paying licensing fees for popular formats is an obvious thing for a personal computer company to do - that Ubuntu, or some of the other "end user" distro, never did just seems petulant.
Why do you need to reminisce about this, these exact posts show up on every Apple hardware release to this day lol
I’ll see if I can find some actual figures
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Back then, it was not really much about Apple, but about Microsoft and Sun. But you get the picture.
The "imac era" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#History
Steve Jobs reduced the company's large product lines immediately upon becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997 ... The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998
[[citation needed]]
To push a bit further, a bunch of us switched to OSX not from windows but FreeBSD or linux. Hardware support for open source OSes was abysmal and getting commercial software to run on even linux was death by thousand cuts at best.
On the work side, anything "not windows" was also just not an option, and we'd code on windows and remote to unix servers as needed.
Introduction of Darwin really created a space where Unix could live in personal and corporate environments.
100% this. I am a huge Linux lover but also really appreciate having the option at work to use MacOS due to the Unix userspace it provides.
That being said, I would pretty much hate MacOS without the open source tooling (Nix, Homebrew, Yabai, SKHD, iTerm, etc.) I can bootstrap onto it.
Nothing like coming in on a Monday and having to debug 10 coworker's machines cuz suddenly python and postgres were silently upgraded (or some random shared lib was upgraded).
"Just use Docker" is also a PITA cuz of the abysmal file system performance stuff... I just want to run software! Or rather, I want my coworkers who might not be as well versed in system software to be able to have working systems.
All that being said, it's undeniable that I can daily drive Linux thanks to Mac stuff existing.
I’ve seen this complaint quite a bit on HN, and I don’t really understand it. Apple helped Docker port over to arm64 on the Mac (which was one of the first pieces of software to use the new fancy hypervisor APIs), and it’s been working for over a year now. If your docker images can’t build on arm64, I don’t really understand how Apple or Docker can make that any easier. Most of the popular images have arm64 builds now, the only holdout I know of is MySQL due to Oracle being Oracle. If you’re building your own images, GitHub Actions and many other CI providers have had ARM64 agents for a long time (and you can build arm Docker images in QEMU super easy on GHA if you need hosted agents).
There’s not much of an excuse anymore, and since arm instances are cheaper on some public clouds, you should be making sure your stuff runs on arm64 now. Especially if it’s a typical Node/.NET/Java/Ruby/Python app, they’ve been arm native for years.
I am (partially) responsible at the MySQL team for Docker images. I however don't use Mac myself. The only thing I am aware of is that for 8.0.28 we were a little late with ARM images due to technical issues, but that should be resolved.
But mind there are different sets of container images: `mysql` is maintained by Docker, Inc. where we only have limited influence and `mysql/mysql-server` which is maintained by us.
I see for instance
https://hub.docker.com/layers/mysql-server/mysql/mysql-serve...
Any specific issue with that? I'd then work with the involved teams to get it resolved. (Preferebly issues via bugs.mysql.com, but I'll check responses here as well)
Yeah, you nailed it: it's fairly trivial to create cross architecture images -- my preferred tool is Docker's buildx plugin[1].
I have an M1 Mac, Raspberry Pi 4 running 64 bit Ubuntu Server and multiple x86_64 bit machines. I try to exclusively use Docker images that are cross-architecture. When they are not cross-architecture I usually just build the project's Dockerfile using the Docker Buildx Github Action[2]. The majority of the time most projects' stock Dockerfile works on all architectures. The few times they don't work are usually when a Dockerfile grabs an x86_64 binary and downloads it. I feel like that is bad practice so I usually just write my own Dockerfile when I encounter that.
A recent image I did this with was Gitleaks[3] (link goes to my Github Action).
I will say I have found that while most projects usually compile well on all platforms, if I ever do run into issues it is usually on 32 bit ARM.
[1] https://docs.docker.com/buildx/working-with-buildx/
[2] https://github.com/docker/setup-buildx-action
[3] https://github.com/heywoodlh/actions/blob/master/.github/wor...
One of the advantages of docker is that you can have systems lock their versions. So our project using say, Neo4J, uses a particular version of it. Not necessarily one with an arm build. This creates predictable and repeatable builds.
So now either we upgrade dependencies out of our expected cycle, or we abandon macs as our development machines. A decent number of us wanted Linux anyway. This is a cost that Apple foisted on us.
> since arm instances are cheaper on some public clouds, you should be making sure your stuff runs on arm64 now.
Some instances might be cheaper, therefore we have to adopt it now? I think the cost/benefit analysis you're performing here is ignoring development costs. Are you a project manager of some kind?
> they’ve been arm native for years.
The native libraries and tools that make them worthwhile are not. Really it only takes a single component to ruin everything.
It’s just like any other dependency. Sometimes you can afford to freeze on a single version until the end of the project, but most of the time projects I’ve been on will regularly upgrade the third party stuff we rely on if for no other reason than security, with things like arm64 support coming along for the ride. We usually prefer to be able to get help with our issues faster than our tickets getting closed with “fixed in new version update”, of course weighing that against breaking API changes or what have you.
With Apple's current market share, it sometimes feels like the unix core is more of an historical artifact, or one of the bullet point in commercial presentations. I don't see them put much efforts in pushing Darwin forward when they could use the same resources for Bridge OS or other parts they see as a differentiating factor.
On the bright side, Mac OX coming to enterprise settings also opened the door for linux laptops, and they became a truly viable alternative. Perhaps linux getting better representation and commercial foothold could help keep Darwin competitive and properly evolving, one could hope.
Or use Nix instead. I've been having a good time with Nix on macOS.
And it is worth remembering what happened with copylefted code in general. Any copylefted content that Apple published caused a bunch of mean spirited and detail oriented critics to insist on proof that all relevant source diffs had been shared. This turned out to be an ongoing support problem that could not be solved despite considerable resources being applied. The intense ongoing hostile attacks from free software advocates caused Apple to rigorously remove as must copylefted content as possible in order to stop the bleeding. Far from this being a weak marketing effort it was a engineering effort that was not strong enough to succeed and got huge amounts of negative attention from the open source community. Interesting that some of the people who put their energy into killing this effort now confidently claim it was never anything but marketing. Never underestimate the capacity of the free open source community to generate rude and mean spirited criticism based on near zero understanding of corporate operations and constraints.
I think this is more a function that Apple created the best lightweight Unix laptop at that time. Windows laptops at that time had horrible command line experience and did not play well with Unix/Linux which is what most web servers were running on. Linux laptops had horrible hardware support.
In 2006, the main reason for Linux was to fix things Microsoft broke, which upon discovery Microsoft would break again, and Linux devs would again restore functionality to Windows networks. So your first point here is somewhat true, Microsoft did not play well with Linux which was moderately successful at playing well with Microsoft.
In 2006, however, most webservers did not run Linux, hardly any did, in fact. Linux took over the data center about 5 years later. In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD w/ Apache, and if not for fanaticism, this would still be true today, because there was and is absolutely nothing wrong with NetBSD that Linux fixes.
Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform.
Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together).
My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable.
[1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web...
Yet, even CERN in early 2000's while migrating from Solaris to Linux (my office had a pile of pizza boxes to be thrown out), most researchers were using Windows 2000 with Framemaker/Word for writing their papers, with remote tooling to access the devenvs.
Enterprise IT was another thing entirely. At the time I was working at an Enterprise Linux vendor and we were very focused on these “Unix to Linux” campaigns. There was so much to do, and a lot of convincing needed to happen to get these business critical workloads over (accounting, payroll, ERPs, etc.).
Ironically, VMware ended up being more instrumental in getting Linux adopted by IT depts everywhere than we ever were. As well as Oracle with Unbreakable Linux, which was released that year.
I don't see how that is possible. Dominant means a majority. Maybe by 2009 Linux still only ran maybe 40% of all Internet webservers, and that is being very liberal. So even by 2009, Linux was not dominant. In 2006, Linux possibly had 2-5% of webservers... if that. By late 2011, Linux probably ran 90% of webservers. It didn't happen overnight, it took more than a decade after 2001 for Linux to dominate the datacenter.
We ran racks of Linux servers in 2001 for back end processing. But our webserver ran NetBSD, like nearly all the other webservers, until about 2009. After 2009, perhaps all new webservers ran Linux, as hardware was replaced, but the Internet was still mostly NetBSD in 2006 with the rest being Windows Server IIS.
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...
The vast majority of these web servers were running on Linux. NetBSD was a very niche OS from about the early 2000s on, and far from common before that. Up until about '97 or so most web servers seemed to be running on NT4 or even Windows 95 (which was in itself a fairly terrible idea but they were simpler times).
My full sentence was qualifying what I meant by "becoming dominant" here: "meaning that most greenfield projects would run on Linux from day one."
In 2006, Linux was not powering a majority of the web, but it was powering a majority of the _new_ web properties launched that year.
I lived through it, and I don't have any citation, but this is incorrect. Linux did not take over the datacenter until 2011/12. In 2006, the main reason for Linux's existence was to fix the things Microsoft kept breaking, also, it was nice to revive older hardware that wouldn't perform with or run current OS versions. IBM actually tried to switch everything to Linux right around 2006, but en mass grey beard AIX system admins revolted, and IBM postponed the "migration." In 2006, Linux was just not mature or stable enough for big iron nor servers for popular websites, and Linux certainly wasn't dominant in any space in 2006, except maybe the dev hobbiest space.
Linux was not omnipresent in the late 90's, regardless of a single server appliance. It was only in 2007 that any major hardware vendor (Dell, HP) even announced it would ship w/ Linux preinstalled. By 2008, NetBSD still had about 50% of webserver space with 30% run on Windows Server. In 2008, Linux ran maybe about 20% of Internet webservers, regardless of Steve Balmer's claim (remember how big the Internet is, i.e. it does not only consist of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft... that is only 4 sites... there were 31M websites in 2008, and most of them still ran NetBSD). A lot of file servers ran on Linux, there was big data being stored on Linux by 2007, there was massive interest in Linux, but Linux was not all there was, and Linux really did not take over the datacenter, where nearly all the hardware ran Linux, until late 2011.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The Raqs got through fans like crazy, for some reason. I think I went through all of the servers twice in two years.
Notably, I believe Facebook was LAMP, and was already becoming a pretty big force in 2006. It's hard to find a good citation for that, but it was my understanding at the time they were.
I think it was pretty common among up-and-comer startups, really. Maybe not so much on the low or high end, which were still dominated by shared hosting and enterprise contracts at the time, respectively. Still, it's the year RHEL launched so things were changing.
There were about 32M websites in 2006. Nearly all of them were not running Linux. Not in 2006.
At any rate, you’re definitely going to have to provide more than a stern tone to make me believe this is true as it’s either very at odds with my experience at the time or your definition of “nearly all” is very unusual.
And finally, as another commenter suggested, if your idea is that this doesn’t also apply to netbsd (ie. nearly all servers weren’t netbsd) the i dunno what to tell you. Some kind of bsd maybe, but netbsd? I really don’t think so.
It is quite simple. Linux took over in 2011. That is 5 years after 2006. We don't have to rewrite history to make Linux look better than it is. Absurd.
On the other hand, I absolutely made no claims about taking over. That's not the argument I have with what you said.
But I was running, or involved in the running of, large and popular production websites in 2006 that absolutely ran on Linux in the datacenter. There were BSD machines in the mix, sometimes as frontend proxies, but the actual website software and the bulk of the compute power of the sites were Linux.
That’s the claim I’m making and i make it because i lived it: Linux was used by popular websites in 2006, regardless of your claims of overall popularity.
But you worked on a large website in 2006 that ran on Linux. So you were a pioneer. Satisfied? In what way does it offend you that Linux didn't have any webserver marketshare to speak of in 2006? It's nothing personal. You are not Linux.
Web serving is not my field but I've been in tech since 1988, and while IIS rapidly gained marketshare in the late 1990s, my impression was that by the 21st century, Linux was becoming dominant.
The biggest NetBSD server I'm aware of is SDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
And that is pretty niche.
I have never, ever seen or heard of NetBSD in production in my entire career. Not once, anywhere.
This is just bias and rewriting history. Linux was popular among younger admins and developers. It was a verve among that generation. Many were running it by 1996, and any who did will have the false impression that it was dominant because they were exposed to it. And while Linux was in the datacenter by 2001, it was not used for web front ends, it was for running backend processing. What I am saying is that Linux had not been widely adopted by the corporate or industrial space as webservers by 2006.
If there were any public facing Linux webservers in 2006, they were in such a minority that claiming it was becoming dominant is only said with the benefit of hindsight, because by 2012, Linux did take over most webservers. But in 2006 no one could know that, because most webservers, 80% or more, from 1994 to 2006 ran NetBSD, and IIS never had as much deployment as NetBSD webservers.
Again, I am not talking about any MAMAA. I am talking about Joe's Electronic Shop, and Xie's Ceramic Hippos, and the vast majority of all the public facing webservers online in the 1990's were running NetBSD, because by the mid-90's, it became ordinary convention, thus no one said, "we should document this for historical purposes."
The UNIX Wars were over and BSD won, so there was no hemming and hawing about what OS to use for a webserver. It was a choice between a handful of proprietary pay OS (Windows Server, AIX, HP/UX, etc.) and the free BSDs. For whatever reason (stability, maturity, practicality, etc. etc.), NetBSD was the vastly more popular choice for webservers, right up until the Linux verve came in and fixed something that wasn't broken. Linux was just a preference at best and a fad at worst. It brought no new features (Apache 2 is Apache 2), was not more secure, though it booted faster, NetBSD never need be rebooted. Linux took over like Pepsi took Coke's marketshare, and there was no rational reason behind this. Today, one is as good or bad as the other. In 2006, Linux was not mature. I know this because IBM scrapped their wide-deployment Linux plans in favor of continuing to develop AIX, which as awful as it is, it was far more stable and mature than Linux in 2006.
Linux only got great, like, astoundingly great (which means as good as any BSD or SysV variant), maybe a decade after the Millennium. In 2001, no company, not even the small ones, were trusting Linux for public facing anything. Maybe Linux had small gains in the web space by 2006, but it couldn't have been more than a few percent, if even a fraction of a percent, of the web. In 2006, the web was nearly entirely Windows Server IIS and NetBSD Apache 2, with the rest in small minority sharing a few percent, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX. And Mary's Coffee Mugs Boutique was not running AIX or Solaris, would have cost a fortune. NetBSD was convention for webservers, and it was free, very well-documented, well-supported, had dozens of thousands of free ports available through pkgsrc, and was very stable, and a mature OS. So it should not be surprising in the least, because it worked, and Linux was not ready, and it wasn't ready because, though the younger IT gen was ravenous for it and crusading for it, the grey beards in decision-making positions hated it (I think because Linux arbitrarily messes with the established directory structure of UNIX, so things were not where they were expected to be, causing frustration among the most experienced UNIX & BSD admins).
I would bet, before Craigslist migrated to CentOS sometime after 2004, from inception and for the entirety of the 90's and the early naughts at least, it probably ran Apache on NetBSD. How the heck can anyone find anything about what OS Newmark was running except the man himself? (I'm fishing to see if Craig lurks here, but at 69, I hope he's lurking on a yacht somewhere instead). I'd also be willing to bet that Amazon was originally hosted and launched from NetBSD servers, but I'd also bet Jeff doesn't remember.
> I'd also be willing to bet that Amazon was originally hosted and launched from NetBSD servers
That's funny. In fact, Amazon decided to switch to Linux in 2001 [0], and completed the transition by 2002 [1]. They were moving from Solaris [2].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20010608093419/http://news.cnet....
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/how-linux-saved-amaz...
[2] https://twitter.com/DanRose999/status/1347677573900242944
As I mentioned in another comment - it's bizarre how NetBSD supposedly absolutely dominated and yet there's absolutely zero documentation of that "fact", while there's lots of people talking about using Unix, Windows, and Linux at the time.
Not so strange that the talk was all about OS with paid licensing. And I don't see lots of people talking about Linux webservers in the early naughts. Linux was in the news because it was interesting, but the news was about reviving older hardware with free OS. Linux made it into production backends in 2001 at the latest, but no one was writing about it.
And in 2001/2, I'm not sure Amazon was all that notable, still a small Internet company then. Also, I'd find it hard to believe Amazon began on Solaris, rather than Solaris being the first early migration (Sun had even better support than NetBSD, but getting the nines was closely tied to Sun hw). Amazon was initially a garage company. I guess it is possible Bezos had a hand me down Solaris server, and ran without Sun support (the hw was that good, Sun's excellent support was hardly needed), or that it was part of the initial investment, but those servers cost tens of thousands.
I'm really beyond trying to convince anyone that 1) Linux only went everywhere later, 2011/12, not in 2001/6, and that 2) NetBSD, for all intents and purposes, was and ran the entire WWW for a decade or more, ignoring IIS and the small amounts of pay unicies. I saw web audits of OS. No one saved any for future review and nostalgia. NetBSD was an incredibly popular webserver for a long, long time, all through the 90's and into the naughts, losing out to Linux sometime between late 2007 and 2009, by which time it had all but disappeared (or the web got massively bigger).
Believe it or not. I'm not sure what my motive would be for trying to deceive die-hard Penquinistas. If we can't find evidence NetBSD dominated webservers, then find evidence some other OS did, but don't trust Microsoft's BS. IIS was a dog and had some minority marketshare increasing by the late 90's only because no one gets fired for choosing Windows.
In 2002? No, Amazon wasn't a small Internet company. It had been around for a decade; it had been publicly traded for half that time. Look at that article I linked - they were spending nearly $100 million a year on infrastructure! Their annual revenue was three quarters of a billion dollars! They were a household name: Time Magazine had already named Jeff Bezos Person of the Year three years prior, in 1999! That CNET article describes them as an "e-commerce giant"...and they felt comfortable betting their tech infrastructure on Linux in 2001, when you insist it would be another decade before it wasn't just for hobbyists.
(And FWIW, Bezos was already quite rich and successful pre-Amazon:
> He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.
Amazon was also quite well-funded from the jump, with dozens of investors, including hundreds of thousands from his parents alone.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...
He could have easily afforded a Solaris box or two for his site.)
I understand that you're not trying to convince anyone of anything, because all you're doing is saying "trust me" over and over. Please understand that, likewise, I'm not trying to convince you, because you're clearly completely disinterested in fact-checking your own beliefs. Nor am I a "Penquinista" fighting for Linux's honour or a BSD Hater or something - while I have one machine running Linux, I've got another running Windows; I've run both OpenBSD and FreeBSD at various times; I'm typing this on a Mac now. My motivation in arguing and providing counter-evidence here is just to try to set the record straight for anyone younger who might be reading this, who wasn't around at the time, whose head might be getting filled with misinformation.
Pics or it didn't happen.
You have an axe to grind and I'm calling BS. If this was so prevalent, it will be trivially easy for you to prove it.
I was deploying Linux in production in the 1990s. A friend of mine ran an entirely Linux-based ISP in the late '90s. I was writing about Linux in the 1990s, e.g. here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030529000441fw_/http://members...
I put together a custom remix of SUSE Linux Pro for PC Pro magazine in 1999.
I was putting in Smoothwall boxes from 2000:
https://smoothwall.org/releases.html
If what you are saying is true, prove it. Show us site reports, deployment queries, support conversations. Show us comparative reviews. Show us some evidence.
I am fascinated and I'd love to write about this, but at the moment, you have provided nothing and you sound more and more like a random ranting Internet loonie with every post.
I definitely remember there being platform horse race info from netcraft around that time as well, so i wonder what happened to it.
God this brings back some… fun… memories: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/platform/windows.html
I think you're absolutely right -- I just couldn't find anything from that timeframe with similar data points (probably lacking Google-fu on my part).
Linux was rapidly becoming a successful free platform for web servers by 1998 - that's when the term LAMP was coined [0]. By 2002 "BSD is dying" was already a meme [1] on Slashdot - it was always a joke, exaggerated, but one with a grain of truth. Unlike the claim that NetBSD dominated the market! And while Netcraft never did claim BSD was dying, they did note in 2001 that far from having a near monopoly, "[BSD] has not achieved significant mindshare widely, as Linux has. This limits BSD’s successes largely to a few particular areas." [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)
[1] https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying
[2] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2001/04/01/april_2001_net...
Linux fanaticism is compelling, but it can not rewrite history. Linux took over far later than you think. Linux started gaining webserver marketshare only by 2008 as a minority, quickly ramped up in a few years, but only by 2011/12 were most webservers running on Linux.
Like, I honestly can't tell if this is some kind of bizarre troll. People keep asking you for sources for your incredible claims, and you just keep making them without a single reference. Where are you getting this 30M number? This 90% number?
Here's another source: Red Hat IPO'd in 1999 on the back of a Linux operating system, per Wikipedia, "achieving—at the time—the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street". Pretty amazing for something that was "barely a curiosity, a hobby".
Here's Netcraft in 2003, claiming a mere 2M sites running FreeBSD and describing it as a blip compared to Linux and Windows.
> Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community.
https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/nearly_2_milli...
Notably they don't even mention NetBSD. In fact, Netcraft barely ever mentions NetBSD. I get _two_ hits on their entire site for it. Pretty big oversight for something running 90% of the web!
Here's a FAQ from 2001 from a commercial BSD company describing FreeBSD as "the most popular open source version of the BSD OS". Weird how, according to you, NetBSD was running 90% of the web up until 2006 but in 2001 FreeBSD was even more popular than it!
I mean, I could go on and on. It's frustrating that I can't find any clear cut OS usage stats from that era, but everything points to Linux being a major player by the early 2000s. For example, Java - which was a very big deal at the time - never really supported BSDs, but supported Linux.
https://coderanch.com/t/110571/os/Java-NetBsd
You had to buy Netcraft's more detailed analysis, but in 2003 based on their previews it's clear they split the world up into "Linux", "Microsoft", "Other", "Solaris", and "Unknown". In the screenshot they show of one DNS owner, Linux was roughly 30% of servers, Microsoft was roughly 50%. Wild how BSD doesn't appear there at all!
https://web.archive.org/web/20030425195510/http://news.netcr...
But why am I wasting my time providing these sources? I gave a bunch already, you ignored them and just kept making the same baseless claims about NetBSD's completely undocumented hegemony over the web that collapsed instantaneously. "Rewriting history" indeed!
FreeBSD was certainly loved, by researchers and universities, but I don't think we can trust a source that appears to be marketing, "we're No. 1!" I know why NetBSD ran the web for so long, because it was based on BSD4.3, ran on everything, was well-supported by a community in active development, included pkgsrc and all the ports that came with it, and it is free, unlike the alternatives Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, which also more often than not took advantage of pkgsrc. Linux was just not a viable option for running a public webserver between 1993-200x, but as to why NetBSD and not FreeBSD, I can't answer, but I know for a fact that most webservers globally ran NetBSD from the development of WWW and for over a decade, and the rest, in minority, ran Windows Server IIS. Why this is not widely documented is no mystery; it just isn't that interesting.
Believe it or not, I honestly don't care. Believe what you wish.
In 2006 I was running about two dozen web servers, and only one of those was NetBSD - the rest were all Debian.
The NetBSD one was my personal server, that lived in the water tank cupboard of my flat hooked up to my thumping great 10Mbps cable modem.
Linux was already well-proven technology by this point, with a variety of free and commercial offerings.
We mostly used Debian, although if people really enjoyed handing over money we'd put RHEL on for them.
Provide supporting evidence, and we will listen. Otherwise: nah.
WebKit[0] would be a counter-example.
Maybe Darwin didn't have value beyond what Apple was doing with it.
WebKit itself is hugely successful because of its use in proprietary projects basically. It's "open source" only by accident, and it seems pretty clear Apple would prefer it not be.
[1] Not that Chromium is a particularly great example of an open source project, but lots of people outside Google build it, ship it, and contribute.
Was that not true? Certainly today WebKit and Blink are significantly different engines with very different performance profiles.
If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.
Really? I see a lot of contributions from Apple engineers to the LLVM codebase
Chromium/Blink will fundamentally never make any engine changes that support user privacy if that change will in anyway hurt their ad business. So the "standard open source HTML engine" now means the engine that supports the ad industry over users.
More marketing stunts? Perhaps. But I'm all for marketing stunts to promote public open source collaboration. Now we'll just continue to hold them to it.
Chromium isn’t an open source project at all. It’s a company project that releases open source code, but all the decisions are made by the company, not by any community.
And you could expect a whole lot more. To me Open Source is less about being able to fork, and more about not being dependent on some particular company.
You have a few engineers with hurt feelings and Apple lost the potential for some contributors to fix issues (at the expense of security by obscurity).
Did the world really need another open source OS?
Darwin is a big deal in that it’s backed by one of the 5 largest tech companies. But when you look at it, it’s essentially just Mach with FreeBSD (NetBSD core utils in PowerPC days) bolted on top.
width: 50%;
margin: auto;
margin-top: 5ex;
line-height: 3ex;
Most folk will find it more comfortable, and particularly if you're a bit dyslexic. Feel free to fiddle with those numbers to make it fit your eyes better.
PureDarwin is quite simply impossible because Apple doesn't understand or care about OSS.
In an alternate reality it would be so cool if you could run MacOS apps on an open source OS. Maybe Darling[1] will one day get us past the point where you could run any MacOS app on Linux (not just simple GUI or CLI apps). That being said there aren't really any apps that I use that aren't available on Linux. But the option to would be nice!
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QWRpEuC...
> The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more.