freebsd-advocacy Digest, Vol 248, Issue 1

[Szilveszter Adam]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 08:02:23PM +0200, Salvatore Albanese wrote:
> We must remind that apple experimented with UNIX many years ago and now use 
> the Darwin distro for MAC OS X. This is a big statement! Imagine a BSD 
> distro that is so easy even windows users find it confortable. 20% of the 
> windows market moved to MAC OX S in that last 18 months.

While I agree that decent, and enthusiastic (but not zealot) advocacy is
a good thing, I think it is very important to say the truth.

It is just too frequently that I here statements that essentially say:
"MacOS X is just FreeBSD with an Apple GUI on it". That's just not true.
The Darwin kernel is a Mach kernel (something that the BSDs do not have
and did  not have with the exception of the failed attempt xMach) which
is very different from the BSD kernel. Darwin only implements some
(many) APIs and borrows some code from the BSDs (like the network code, but
boy, there is hardly an OS that does not have BSD-derived TCP/IP code
somewhere in it) and contains userland applications that were ported
from the BSDs. But that does not make it a BSD system. Otherwise, it
would be truly difficult to explain why it took so long for FreeBSD to
grow suport for the PPC arch, when Darwin was already out there :-)

If you want to brag about FreeBSD technology used in a mainstream
product, then by all means mention Firefox 3, because that is already
quite impressive.

-- 
Regards:

Szilveszter ADAM
Budapest
Hungary