Apple & FreeBSD relationship

[Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC]

On Mar 9, 2011, at 3:00 PM, Nerius Landys wrote:

> This is not a technical question.
> 
> Basically I have some cash sitting around.  I'm thinking of investing
> part of it with a company that I believe in.  Apple came to mind.  You
> could say that I'd like to judge Apple's moral character before
> investing money with them.  Does anyone know how Apple reciprocates to
> FreeBSD?  After all a lot of MacOSX is borrowed from FreeBSD.  I am
> not seeing Apple's name on this page:
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml .  Are there
> other ways in which Apple might be reciprocating?


There are some/a few/several people working at Apple that play or used to play a large role in FreeBSD.  So they were basically paying these people's salaries for their day job which allowed them to be active in FreeBSD.  Also, there is some code put-back I believe.

Most of what Apple used from FreeBSD was the userland and the kernel interface so that the Darwin kernel could be used with FreeBSD userland utilities that affect the kernel etc.    Mac OS X uses a totally different underlying kernel and architecture but made a FreeBSD like kernel interface in order to be able to use certain sets of FreeBSD stuff.