[danachow]

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.