[TheDong]

Apple set itself up for defeat in the server and developer marketplace as soon as they decided macOS was proprietary code.

Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?

It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.

[bschwindHN]

> It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS

I know I'm basically taking the bait, but I guess I've not been "seriously" developing stuff for the past decade or two, which is news to me!

[m132]

OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.

That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.

I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.

[alwillis]

> Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard

Apple uses OpenBSD's Packet Filter [1]; I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem. Back in the Snow Leopard days, it was FreeBSD's IPFW, which is also no slouch.

Whatever a firewall can do, PF can do it.

You can also get a nice GUI for PF [2].

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html

[2]: https://www.murusfirewall.com/murus/

[m132]

Yes, I meant pf. Indeed, it was there in the source tree in 10.6 but they only flipped it on it in release builds in 10.7. My bad. Either way, it has hardly changed since then, while the OpenBSD upstream continued to progress.

> I doubt multiple routing tables are a problem.

The lack of them is a limitation for me (complex VM + VPN setup), which requires me to do pretty unholy static routing and address rewriting with pf.

I think even Apple has come across this; they added "scoped routing" (which IMO is a hacky workaround providing some of the functionality you'd get with multiple routing tables) just before iOS shipped with MMS support. Android, for comparison, uses Linux's routing policies and tables to send and receive MMS.

[alwillis]

> OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.

"Exploring Darwin and PureDarwin: The Open-Source Foundation of Apple's Operating Systems" - https://machaddr.substack.com/p/exploring-darwin-and-puredar...

[pjmlp]

Apparently game, desktop and app devs aren't serious.

[vehemenz]

No offense, but serious developers don’t think this way at all.

[bel8]

For server side, which I believe is the context here, Linux and open source are king.

Even Microsoft gave up on Windows and just runs Linux most things except niche cases. Heck, even SQL Server which is expensive piece of machinery got ported to Linux and that's the default target now in their docs.

With that said, one can't deny Apple's success on the b2c side of things so it feels wrong to call their strategy a failure.

[pjmlp]

Except the cloud isn't open source, the ones that matter to developers that is.

Which is why so many projects get burned with their license choices.

[gf000]

I don't see how this comment is relevant to parent's point. Sure, cloud is proprietary. But it is Linux for the vast majority.

[pjmlp]

Which is an Pyrrhic victory, when Linus and other founders are long gone, most of this generation actually, what will subsist are proprietary forks, just like what happened with UNIX System V.