Came in here to be that guy and make this comment, but you beat me to it. Have an up-vote.

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 :)

Well, OS X's ancestors had a largely BSD-derived userspace so that's neither here nor there. The strongest claim and perhaps biggest contribution, I think, was GCC on which NeXTs Objective C compiler was based from the beginning.

If my memory serves me right, early OSX used tcsh as the default shell; it wasn't till around 10.4 or so that they switched to bash.

GNU yes, but GNU pre-dates Linux. I first used GCC on SunOS.

NCSA httpd also predates Linux.

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."

That's CERN httpd release notes for 0.1 @ 1991, not NCSA. NCSA didn't join the web until much later.

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.

Doh, missed the edit window. However, it's clear that NCSA was not initially developed on or for Linux.

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.