licence

Posted Apr 29, 2010 5:12 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
In reply to: licence by rsidd
Parent article: LLVM 2.7 released

> Apple has chosen as its base a significantly less popular open-source project (Mach/BSD instead of Linux; khtml instead of gecko) on the grounds that its codebase was cleaner and more maintainable

I don't think that "cleaner and more maintainable" was Apple's reason for choosing Mach/BSD. NeXTSTEP was first released in October 1988, almost three years before Linux 0.01. Then it was rebranded "OPENSTEP for Mach", then "Rhapsody", then "Mac OS X Server 1.0", then "Mac OS X 10.0", etc.

licence

Posted Apr 29, 2010 8:31 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

The link is the OpenStep API, which is cross-platform -- not tied to Mach/BSD. Perhaps the NeXT historical connection is why Apple went for a Mach/BSD kernel -- but they did experiment with Mach/Linux too (MkLinux) and in principle could have layered Openstep on top of any OS.

licence

Posted Apr 29, 2010 9:43 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Avi Tevanian did a lot of the work on Mach at CMU, became a senior technologist at NeXT and then at Appel. He was a primary architect of NexTSTEP and of OS-X.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadis_Tevanian