I can't anyone is even disputing the fact that OS X didn't largely benefit from the fact that there was tons of GNU/GPL tooling out of the box that power users could use. Bash? GCC/G++ (before the clang/llvm migration out)? GNU. X-windows (granted I don't think many people used it post-Carbon, but I remember using it on my iBook 266mhz...).

\/ Edit: Mea culpa. IIRC you're right re: tcsh. I haven't used OS X as a daily operating system since first year undergrad (placing that at just under a decade) so afford me some liberties with details, kindly :)

NCSA httpd released version 0.1 was June 1991. http://www.w3.org/Daemon/Features.html

Amusingly: http://www.diam.unige.it/informatica/documentazione/httpd_do... "3.5) Why doesn't NCSA HTTPd work on my Linux system? NCSA HTTPd is not crippled. Linux may be crippled. NCSA HTTPd uses a standard BSD4 and SYSV feature known as file descriptor passing. NCSA HTTPd supports both the BSD and SYSV style of file descriptor passing. Linux chose not to implement either."

In fact, SLAC was first to the web in the USA, and Marc had originally approached my boss, who wrote MidasWWW, to see if he'd want to collaborate on the web browser which would become Mosaic.

PS: An interesting side note, the SGML standard committee decided not to include hyperlinks which more or less directly resulted in HMTL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La... I wonder if that would have pushed the web forward even faster or not as HTML is far less strict, but you could make a less strict render for SGML as well.

I don't think so. But IRC predates Linux. :)

All of these components played their part in the rise of the OS and benefited from each other. The Linux kernel as well as things like the GNU project were absolutely necessary for this ecosystem to becoming a reality and that is what OS X benefited from as well.

Not quite, actually.

Samba => sometime in 1992

Linux => October 1991

It wasn't invented for Linux, but Samba exists today because of it.

Not to say that was the entire market, but it was a good chunk of it.

For reference, older Linux desktop options were... well, I'll just say they played a lot like Dwarf Fortress.

Otherwise I only saw Solaris or commercial types of unix (like what came with IBM servers) in use in companies I directly worked with. I understand that linux was already rising pretty strong, but tried and true Unix/BSD systems were definitely seen as the more 'serious'/professional choices.

Which was interesting because then Linux became faster, and had things like better SMP support that didn't get improved in BSD to give it the performance edge until 2007 or so...

(Disclaimer: I am one of those programmers who only switched to Apple because of the tiBook, which was a damned sexy Unix workstation in spite of the fact it was also a damned sexy laptop.. and I used it for developing apps for Linux and SGI Irix without much hassle.)

You had to take care to use libraries/APIs that were available at all three systems (no dlopen() or dlsym() at the time in OSX!), and take quirks of the OSX linker into account.

(Disclaimer: I was getting angry at Apple at the time. In a few years, they went through OS9->OSX migration, getting rid of Classic mode in emulation and now switching to Intel. They were breaking compatibility again; it meant buying new software like MS Office again - looking at the PC side, they didn't have such problem. So PB12 was my last Mac for a long time... until 2015, actually).

To me it's when the Intel macs came along (10.4.4 I think) that new adopters really started picking up steam, but the ecosystem they helped build wasn't really there yet.

At least, that's my perception.

Everyone was buzzing about Linux. The general attitude was 'Why would you run Solaris when you could just run Linux'

Maybe in other segments Solaris was a 'big deal' but for students and developers Linux was a game changer.

Hardly. How would have Apple developed a full userland and development toolchain with the resources it had at that time? That's exactly the point of the article: OS X wouldn't be where it is without Linux (read: GNU/Linux), not because it was technically the best Unix (it wasn't), but because it was free software.

Linux succeeded due to its compatibility with this rich ecosystem of software, not the other way around.

What Linux changed that it opened the GNU software to much wider audience. You didn't need an expensive Sun workstation, cheap (relatively, at the time) PC was enough.

With the Linux kernel and GNU software, you had a complete, usable system, that anybody could use. Many people did, and they contributed back. The development accelerated.

So technically, no, OSX doesn't rely on Linux-the-kernel. But it benefited by the increased exposure GNU software got.

(Samba is about a year younger than Linux-the-kernel.)

Linux did not exist at the time.