Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Mac OS X Server Press Conference

Author:Jonathan Hendry
Posted:3/16/1999; 3:41:18 PM
Topic:Mac OS X Server Press Conference
Msg #:4190 (In response to 4187)
Prev/Next:4189 / 4191

"All the components they are releasing as open source already were open sourced"

Actually, nope. HFS, AppleTalk, and Netinfo haven't been OpenSource. Nor have NeXT's OO driver technology or the ObjectiveC runtime. Or NeXT's SoundKit classes (which are pretty stale now, having been written for the black boxes.)

It'll be really nice if Netinfo is ported and integrated with other platforms like Linux and NT. It's always been a bit of a very attractive freak.

It shouldn't take too long to get the Darwin stuff running on Intel (or other platforms). What you'll have then is basically OSX/Server without a UI - a console-mode Apple Mach/Unix box. (There is a rumor that OSX/Server may ship with a lot of fat binaries and fat libraries which contain Intel code in addition to PPC. The theory is, these could be copied to a Darwin/Intel box, and you'd have an Intel box running MacOSX Server - GUI and all.) The Darwin code appears to include a lot of code NeXT put together for HPPA and Sparc, in addition to PPC and Intel.

Once a console is up, it shouldn't be too long before X-Windows and various Window managers start moving over from Linux. At this point, there will be little practical difference between Linux and Darwin-plus-XWindows.

Why didn't they use Linux from the start? My guess is that they like some features of Mach that Linux doesn't support, like Mach's messaging. Their ports to NT, HPUX, and Solaris have required software to take the place of these Mach features, which has occasionally been a bit klunky.

So instead of moving their upper-level stuff to Linux, they're trying to turn the lower-levels into a Linux-like system. The end result should be about the same as replacing the lower end with Linux, with the added benefit that Apple stays on technology they're intimately familiar with.

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