[EVA] [OT] NERV iPods

[JD Erickson]

After seeing the misconceptions being thrown about, and in the 
interest of adequately propagating knowledge of open-source and 
alternative OSes I would like to quickly make a final interjection 
on this OT thread of conversation, in order to make definite 
clarifications and lessen any confusion and mis-education about 
BSD systems that may have inadvertently been caused.

There are 3 major Berkeley System Distributions (BSDs), all 
deriving from the original BSD OS developed at UC Berkeley 
in the 1980's. Among them are NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD 
(as an aside, OpenBSD was developed by a former NetBSD developer 
due to a disagreement over the future of NetBSD, and OpenBSD is 
currently considered the most secure OS ever, right out of the 
box, and has only ever had ONE remote-root exploit discovered in 
the past EIGHT years. Naturally the trade-off is that it's not 
as easy as other OSes to set up and maintain). 

The 1994 NetBSD 1.0 release was derived from a 1992 release 
of 386BSD 0.1, which in turn is derived from an OS called Net/2 
released in 1991, which in turn was derived from the 1990 release 
of UC Berkeley 4.3 BSD Reno, which in turn is derived from 
previous restricted UCB releases dating back to the early 1980's,
which in turn are all derived from, though not totally compliant 
with,** the Single UNIX® Specification, which in turn builds on the 
Austin Group/IEEE/ISO joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX® Standard and Issue
6 of the Open Group Base Specifications.* 

Current releases of NetBSD are now derived from UCB 4.4 
BSD-Lite2, as are current releases of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD
has been used as the basis for other projects as well.

Given the nature of BSD, development of BSD and its derivatives 
is very, very slow. Over the course of a decade, NetBSD only 
jumped ONE major version number, and version 2 was just released 
on the 4th of December, 2004. OpenBSD is currently at version 3.6,
and FreeBSD is at version 5.3. The reason for such variance is due
to the differing focuses of each BSD's development team. OpenBSD
focuses utterly on security (very time-consuming), NetBSD focuses 
on security and primarily on 100% cross-platform compatibility and 
inter-operability (also time-consuming), and FreeBSD focuses 
primarily on the i386 architecture (therefore being the fastest in 
development). Most public web servers that you will likely ever
connect to run FreeBSD or Linux, and in the cases of some large 
commercial websites, Windows Enterprise Server (LOL). 

Getting to the point, much of Apple's OSX (and almost all of 
Darwin) is based on 4.4BSD-Lite2. Currently the kernel is derived 
from NetBSD, and the "user space" (commands, utilities, daemons, etc) 
are taken largely from FreeBSD. The GUI (Aqua) is custom-made by 
Apple, although support for X (standard *nix display system) and
Open Motif (standard *nix GUI API) applications is included out of 
the box, with support for others being easily implemented, if you 
know how.

OSX is fully open source, and backed by Apple's development team. 
Any code improvements are folded back into the NetBSD and FreeBSD 
source trees. In fact, OSX (last I heard), is moving towards full 
convergence with FreeBSD. Though I can't fully confirm the validity
of that statement, as I've not done research into it, it largely 
makes sense for them to make such a decision.***

And yes, this also means that OSX will work perfectly fine on 
custom PC hardware, although attempting to install it without
previous UNIX experience isn't recommended unless under supervision 
of a huge UNIX nerd.

Further, I can also confirm that this means OSX is a superior OS to
Windows, as far as industry standards and compatibility.

It will only be a matter of time until game developers and hardware
driver developers realize the true value of the industry standard, and
develop their software for it alongside Windows. Contrary to common
belief, the over-saturation of Windows does not make it an industry
standard in the least. Standards are specified by people like the RFC
Editor (formerly Jon Postel, and now a collection of people called the 
ISOC; see rfc-editor.org), the ISO, the IEEE, and other standards 
organizations. Members of standards groups are employees and research 
teams spread across many different companies (see 
http://www.ietf.org/iesg.html for an example), thus the term "industry 
standard".

-----------
JD Erickson
Eternally OT
jde at infowest.com


* The UNIX Specification was previously maintained by Novell and is
now administered by the Open Group (http://www.opengroup.org).

** The only OS that is 100% compliant with the current UNIX 
Specification (UNIX 03 Product Standard) is IBM's AIX. There are
others that are 100% compliant with the older standards, UNIX95 and 
UNIX98.

*** Although Apple has made OSX open source, the BSD license allows 
for commercial (for profit) re-distribution of modified BSD code, 
without having to provide the source code to the end-user or fold 
improvements back into the original BSD source tree. Thankfully, 
however, Apple has chosen to fold them back in, thus improving open 
source innovation and development as a whole. The GPL license, which 
Linux and GNU software is released under, *requires* that any changes 
to original GPL source code be made publicly available, and cannot 
be sold for profit. That is why Linux companies like Red Hat must make 
their money through enterprise support, consulting and teaching 
services, and when you purchase a copy of Red Hat Linux, you are 
actually purchasing the media and packaging, as well as a term 
of support services, rather than the OS itself. For Red Hat, besides 
the kernel and GNU software itself on 4 CDs, you also get the full OS 
source code on what is currently 5 CDs, as well as full documentation 
for everything on another CD.

Eduardo Páez Trujillo wrote:

>OSX is FreeBSD based. FreeBSD is allows to be distributed commercially. I
>think that's why Apple choosed that OS.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Tommy Rude [mailto:tommyrude at hotmail.com] 
>Sent: Lunes, 27 de Diciembre de 2004 11:02 a.m.
>To: evangelion at eva.onegeek.org
>Subject: RE: [EVA] NERV iPods
>
>OsX is UNIX based. 
>
>
>  
>