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by askvictor 1461 days ago
They did kind of head that way in the early days of OSX, to try to bootstrap a development community by being close enough to Linux to make it easy enough to switch. I'd probably characterise them as having an abusive relationship with Open source.
2 comments
ratww 1461 days ago
This part of the macOS developer community bootstrapped itself. Apple at the time was trying to sell Java WebObjects and Carbon/Cocoa in public.

The proximity with Linux was an accident. NeXT is from the late 80s, pre Linux, and NeXT was the baggage OS X had to work with. They didn't strip out the Unix parts, but also didn't widely proclaim it was "close to Linux". It was mostly the developer community touting it as an advantage of macOS, with Apple later admitting "yeah yeah that's also cool" and later shipping Python and Ruby alongside Perl just for completion.

Even when Apple clearly tried to help Homebrew by offering a Xcode-less toolchain there was not even a peep about the purpose of "Command Line Tools". It took them years to acknowledge it existed.

Also, like the sibling response said, Linux only started being as widely used later than OS X.

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askvictor 1460 days ago
Interesting; I only had the perspective of being a Linux enthusiast at that time, and that's what it seemed like, but it's easy to forget that our numbers were quite small back then.
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danachow 1461 days ago
This history doesn’t make sense - the early days of OSX predate widespread adoption of Linux. When OSX was released Linux 2.4 was just released and that was just the beginning of Linux becoming something interesting commercially in the data center (at the time Linux was more just slowly eroding incumbent commercial Unix - which is why Microsoft was concerned about it, since they had spent the 90s relying on commercial Unix vendors to fuck each other up) - there just wasn’t some huge commercial Linux community that Apple was trying to tap into - especially for a desktop operating system. The Darwin userland is BSD based after all. And while Apple made do with gcc, they’ve clearly never been too gung ho to get wrapped up with anything GPL related.

If anything Apple offered Solaris, Irix refugees a viable desktop transition.

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