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Seriously, sounds like Macs are getting more like Linux boxes every day


Well the core of the OS is Darwin, a fully open sourced BSD OS that runs on both PPC and x86. OS X ships with quite a few Unix tools in it including Apache when "personal web sharing" is turned on, Samba for windows file sharing, and an X11 application to allow X11 apps to run in Aqua. Beyond that, projects like Fink bring in the majority of other open source programs for Unix platforms.

The top half (Aqua and other GUI components) are the closed source bits, but a few things are open. Safari is based off KHTML out of Konquerer, and the next iChat is adding in pieces of Jabber.

OS X is really just a continuation of NeXTStep, with many classic Mac OS touches. Apple wanted to replace Mac OS with something more modern, and was either considering NeXTStep or BeOS. Thankfully they chose NeXTStep, as this brought back Steve Jobs. I think without a drastic change in their leadership, Apple would be gone today. For any OS X owners, check out Jobs showing NeXTStep 3.0. Definitly lots of things there that still exist in Mac OS X.

For a few of my work friends, OS X is quickly turning into their *nix of choice, usually on a portable like the iBook.