From “Apple's Leopard Is Better ‘Linux’ Than Linux”...
On the down side, people with malicious intent can use this extensive archive to figure out ways to hack the Mac. The fact that this hasn’t happened—like I said above, Darwin has been available for years—is a testament to the integrity of the Apple community.
No, it means that it’s really true that openness leads to better security. In fact, Apple took a lot of their open source code from OpenBSD, a system known for its security focus.
So here are my observations: Mac OS X, and Apple’s development paradigm, is the anti-Linux. And it’s Steve Jobs’ big accomplishment that Apple has built a better (I should actually say “more successful”) Linux than Linus Torvalds has ever been able to do.
This seems to imply that Mac OS X and Linux (or Jobs and Torvalds) have the same goals, which clearly has never been the case.
Edit: It would seem I’m misremembering. It seems Apple leveraged FreeBSD more than OpenBSD. See the comments.
2 comments:
That is a misconception, Apple took FreeBSD code, not OpenBSD code.
I had remembered Apple doing some heavy raiding on OpenBSD at some point as well, but I may be misremembering. Thanks for the correction.
Of course, the relationships between BSD, Mach+BSD lite, NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, Darwin/Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD could be a topic of a lengthy article itself.
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