Is this bunk.

[Bob Hall]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 01:25:34AM +0100, Garry wrote:
> Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor lock-in),
> they do give a little back to BSDs, but have made sure that BSDs can't get
> much off of them, but they can get a lot out of BSD.

If the kernel is the basis of an OS, then OS X is basically the Mach
kernel. The userland part of early versions of OS X borrowed heavily
from NetBSD, but much of this has been replaced with FreeBSD in later
version. Or so I'm told. As someone else has pointed out, Apple has made
some important contributions to NFS, so they are not exactly free
riders.
 
> Also, Windows uses  (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking for
> instance.

NT had a notoriously unstable network stack. It suddenly became more
stable with Win2k, which turned out to be due to the replacement of much
of the code with code taken from FreeBSD, which has a famously stable
network stack. People who claim to have seen the MS code say that large
parts of it are unchanged from the original FBSD code, and include the
original comments. As far as I know, that code is still being used.

> This does not mean to say that I have a problem with the quality of the code
> in BSD, I just feel that the license is counter productive.

And the wonderful thing about the proliferation of open source licenses
is that you can pick a project with a license that you approve of and
never have to have your code encumbered by a license you feel is
inferior. The people who use FBSD and the wonderful people who produce
it obviously feel that the FBSD license is the sort of license that they
want to support. You are free to pity our delusions and choose a project
with a more enlightened approach.

Best of luck!