I tend to agree with this take; as a pedantic side note, though, I’m not sure that OS X was ever based on FreeBSD – they took the unix userland, sure; but from the very start (NextSTEP), the kernel was derived from the Mach kernel, which itself was a fork of the 4.3BSD kernel; and the core libraries were written from scratch, all in the interests of marketing “quick application development” capability to Next’s customers. (Actually there’s an interview with S. Jobs somewhere where he lays this out very clearly; it was the late 80s/early 90s, the heyday of object-oriented toolkits & VMs after all)
I’m sure they’ve helped themselves liberally to the FreeBSD kernel for features; though still, OS X never was ‘based on’ FreeBSD (let alone a ‘FreeBSD with a pretty coat of paint’, as people like to say).
I tend to agree with this take; as a pedantic side note, though, I’m not sure that OS X was ever based on FreeBSD – they took the unix userland, sure; but from the very start (NextSTEP), the kernel was derived from the Mach kernel, which itself was a fork of the 4.3BSD kernel; and the core libraries were written from scratch, all in the interests of marketing “quick application development” capability to Next’s customers. (Actually there’s an interview with S. Jobs somewhere where he lays this out very clearly; it was the late 80s/early 90s, the heyday of object-oriented toolkits & VMs after all)
I’m sure they’ve helped themselves liberally to the FreeBSD kernel for features; though still, OS X never was ‘based on’ FreeBSD (let alone a ‘FreeBSD with a pretty coat of paint’, as people like to say).