[GNUz] O/S compare

[Jim Cheetham]

On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 05:59:54PM +1300, Richard Tindall wrote:
> Is OS/X a BSD? Yes: Dale's answered that a single BSD license/program in the whole O/S means that it is. So that's a very low 
> requisite for belonging to 'the BSD family', and includes LINUX? - even more than OS/X (?)

No, it's not "a BSD" because you are not being precise. It doesn't use
the same kernel as the existing BSD *distributions*. It takes a lot of
the user-space tools from FreeBSD, and adds a lot of it's own stuff into
Dawrin, including the arguably innovative _launchd_ service that
replaces rc* scripts, cron, inittab and a lot of other interesting
things. None of the other unixes have that (Solaris has an approach that
does similar things, I just don't quite know what it is yet!), but
because it's been open sourced (under Apple's license) "a Linux" may
choose to use it too.

> I guess that's why everything just gets called 'Unix'. ..But that's a brand too ..moreso that BSD.

Everything gets called "unix" because it has a set of common features,
including a priviledged kernel, many "cheap" inheriting processes,
"everything as a file" access to resources and ultimately compliance to
POSIX, which goes to the level of saying you must have an "ls" command.

The license is not a part of that definition :-) and the "brand" of unix
is going the way of becoming a generic term, IMHO. Probably why Apple
have chosen to stay away from claiming that they are a "unix", even
though all the hackers know that they are.