[Wlug] Linux Choix?

[Richard Klein]

On Nov 17, 2007 10:59 PM, Colin Novick <c-novick-1 at alumni.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Before anyone needs to chastise me I looked it up and OS X is more Next and
> other sources than Linux per se.

Not to chastise you, but I wanted a definitive answer, so I turned to
wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mac_OS_X#Development_outside_of_Apple):
"NeXTSTEP was based on the Mach kernel and BSD, an implementation of
Unix dating back to the 1970s. Perhaps more remarkably, it featured an
object-oriented programming framework based on the Objective-C
language. This environment is known today in the Mac world as Cocoa.
It also supported the innovative Enterprise Objects Framework database
access layer and WebObjects application server development
environment, among other notable features.

All but abandoning the idea of an operating system, NeXT managed to
maintain a business selling WebObjects and consulting services, but
was never a commercial success. NeXTSTEP underwent an evolution into
OPENSTEP which separated the object layers from the operating system
below, allowing it to run with less modification on other platforms.
OPENSTEP was, for a short time, adopted by Sun Microsystems. However,
by this point, a number of other companies — notably Apple, IBM,
Microsoft, and even Sun itself — were claiming they would soon be
releasing similar object-oriented operating systems and development
tools of their own. (Some of these efforts, such as Taligent, did not
fully come to fruition; others, like Java, gained widespread
adoption.)

Following an announcement on December 20, 1996,[1] on February 4, 1997
Apple Computer acquired NeXT for $427 million, and used OPENSTEP as
the basis for Mac OS X.[2] Traces of the NeXT software heritage can
still be seen in Mac OS X. For example, in the Cocoa development
environment, the Objective-C library classes have "NS" prefixes, and
the HISTORY section of the manual page for the defaults command in Mac
OS X straightforwardly states that the command "First appeared in
NeXTStep.""

So, yes, OS X is based on OPENSTEP, an evolution of NeXTSTEP.  And
it's based on BSD.  And it's based on Mach.

-- 
Rich