The computer labs at my uni were Solaris workstations almost everyone hated them. I completed most of our assigned work using Linux on my home pc (along with a heap of other students in my class) this was in late 90's.

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.

You are absolutely correct, Linux was a game changer. It deserves it's success. No argument there at all. That's not what we're talking about though. I don't believe Linux's success had any appreciable benefits for OS X. Linux came along far too late in the day to play that role.

> In fact if Linux had never happened Solaris would probably still be around and we'd be arguing about how much OS X owes to Solaris

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.

You do know that OS X was just a rebranding of NeXTSTEP which dates back to 1985 and so had all those things (dev tool chain, userland, etc) 6 years before Linux started, right? How much did NeXTSTEP owe to Linux, say in 1990?

NexTSTEP didn't have a lot of stuff that OSX had. Samba comes to mind. Another are autofs, bash, curl, less, libxml2, libxslt, screen and countless others.

Samba, bash, screen and autofs all predate Linux and most of the rest were either initially developed on others unixes or at least at a time when Linux was far away from its current dominance. The idea that modern OSX relies in any material way on Linux is simply obviously false to anyone with a basic understanding of the history of UNIX.

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

At the time, GNU had a problem: they had almost complete userland, but no kernel. That meant, that you needed some other expensive system to run the GNU software. Hurd was just around the corner, for years.

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.)

screen was posted to net.sources in March 1987, under the name BSD screen manager. It made it to comp.sources.unix in August 1987 (v10i095), and was BSD multi-screen manager.

Linux did not exist at the time.

Apple had a full UNIX userland and development tool chain years before Linux existed. It was called A/UX.

Err, it would have got them from NeXT which got them partially from GNU. No Linux was involved in the making of this operating system.

Mac OS X borrowed that stuff from BSD, not Linux.