[ratww]

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.

[askvictor]

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.