Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Posted May 22, 2009 5:27 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
In reply to: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld) by flewellyn
Parent article: Ex-Microsoftie: Free Software Will Kill Redmond (ComputerWorld)

Mac OS 9 and prior had a kernel, of course. It was not a Unix-style kernel, but it was a kernel nonetheless.

Just curious, was Apple's move to the Unix-like BSD kernel motivated somewhat by the need for POSIX compliance? I can only imagine that their pre-OSX kernel was hideously non-POSIX compliant, being proprietary and platform- and hardware-specific as it was.

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Nope - they needed something workable

Posted May 22, 2009 5:48 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

Read the Wikipedia article about Copland. It was classic failure of management and when the fiasco was apparent they only had two choices: NextStep or BeOS. Both POSIX-compliant.

Nope - they needed something workable

Posted May 22, 2009 17:33 UTC (Fri) by xilun (guest, #50638) [Link] (1 responses)

Are you sure BeOS was Posix compliant?

Wikipedia claims so...

Posted May 24, 2009 2:38 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It has POSIX compatibility and access to a command line interface through Bash, although internally it is not a Unix-derived operating system.

I'm not sure it ever passed certification tests, but real programs worked fine. Compare with Windows NT (which passed certification tests but was mostly unusable as POSIX system).