[DeathArrow]

>Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that.

They have a long history with XNU and BSD. And Linux has s GPL license which might not suit Apple.

>Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return.

They share a lot of code with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Which are open source. And Darwin is open source, too. So there's no loss that open source suffers.