I think Jobs did believe in Unix, as a way to have a system that doesn't fall down all the time; just he wasn't perhaps on board with all the crusty bits that come with Unix.

More likely it was that Mach was a fully functional free OS. Next only had to slap a GUI toolkit on top of to have their own OS. Also as it was a teaching OS, so it was easy to find reference material + developers.

Microsoft more or less did the same thing with OpenBSD and NT kernel. Several kernel sections started out as BSD code (the networking stack for example).

Don't forget Jobs attempted to steal NeXt's fork of the GCC with Obj-C extensions. The FSF had to sue NeXt to get them to release their modifications.

Stealing Free Software is cheap from a business perspective.

> Don't forget Jobs attempted to steal NeXt's fork of the GCC with Obj-C extensions. The FSF had to sue NeXt to get them to release their modifications.

Actually there was no lawsuit. NeXT released the patches after a warning: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/talks/LinuxTag-2011/compliance.html

> Stealing Free Software is cheap from a business perspective.

This is why I recommend everyone use AGPLv3 whenever possible (and consider changing the license on your old Free Software - you can do this if all of the contributors consent). Apple has been removing all GPLv3 software from Mac OS X over the past several years because v3 is incompatible with their goals of totalitarian computing: http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/

Google is on the same path.

Brillo and Fuchsia have almost no GPL or LGPL licensed code.

They also are in the process of kicking GCC out of the Android NDK. Only a few feature parity issues are preventing it for the time being.

I don't think so.

When Apple tried A/UX he was on his way out and it was never an attempt to replace Mac OS.

Regarding NeXT, the company was targeting the new workstation market, which was moving away from Lisp and Ada Machines into UNIX ones, thanks to UNIX code being freely available, as AT&T was not allowed to charge for it.

NeXT main competition were Sun and Irix workstations, so a certain compatibility with UNIX was desired.

However the whole Mach stack was very UNIX-unlike. Many naysayers regarding Objective-C use for systems programming aren't aware that even NextSTEP drivers were written in it.

So it was all about business, Steve was always keen on how Xerox PARC OSes used to work.

For what is worth, Unix and Mach have a long tradition of being welded together, starting with OSF/1 and derivatives.

Which was created with the purpose to move away from AT&T design.

We can probably think of A/UX as Apple's chess piece, positioned against Microsoft's chess piece of the same type: Xenix.