Apple to IX

Phishfry

Phishfry

I found this article interesting. How much more polished is FreeBSD 4 years later?
https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/
Link stolen from HackerNews comments.

I see Rodney Grimes was an original developer. Is'nt he on this forum too? I thought i saw he got his commit bit back a few months ago.

11.1 is working well for me. I have used freebsd-update on my server and did a couple of scratch installations.
 
When it was announced he (Hubbard) was leaving Apple and going to iXsystems I was excited as I'm one of the people that think FreeBSD was at it best during the 4.x releases...but I have no idea what he has actually done but announce NextBSD that seems to never gone anywhere and the url doesn't even work anymore. Here is the wiki page for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD

I had one exchange with him on mailing list when he came back, and I can't say I think he's the same person that went to Apple.
 
From what I understand, Hubbard was responsible for overseeing FreeNAS Corral and left around the time it was released and received negative reviews. I'm not sure what else he was responsible for while CTO at iXsystems.

I believe Rod Grimes does have his commit bit back, and has attended various BSD conferences over the last year or so.
 
The trick with Apple is that the software it builds is so polished. Its operating systems don't feel like "tool kits." They feel like the finished article. Hubbard believes open source OSes should feel the same. "Most open source people make tool kits," he says. "They're good tool kits that have been used in everything from Tivos to phones, but they're still just tool kits."
Click to expand...

And the fact they are toolkits allows them to remain flexible, standard and most important of all; alive!
As soon as you start tightly integrating with other systems in the name of "polish", especially UI they tend to die off with the whims of change and trends. This is also the reason lots of people avoid software tied to certain desktop environments.

Not to mention, Apple's software isn't really polished as such, it is instead simply restricted or limited artificially to avoid non-technical users making mistakes (not a bad idea for consumers, but useless for the technical community). As soon as you need to do something complex, you are right back at the BSD Subsystem, using a terminal emulator. I wouldn't call that any more polished than using FreeBSD.

Software should be kept simple and elegant, that way no polish is needed, it is what it is. Machinery, not an "experience".
 
"THAT IPAD IN your hand? It feels like the most modern of computers. But like the iPhone and the Macintosh, the Apple tablet revolves around a core piece of software that can trace its roots all the way back to the early 1970s. It was built atop UNIX,"

So i know NOTHING about the internals of Ipad..but really how UNIX *is* an ipad?
 
I've never owned an iAnything. I have no use for an iPhone and have no idea what use an iPad would be to me. An Apple II was, however, the first computer I ever used.

I could make use of an iPod but have survived without one.
 
TjPhysicist said:
"THAT IPAD IN your hand? It feels like the most modern of computers. But like the iPhone and the Macintosh, the Apple tablet revolves around a core piece of software that can trace its roots all the way back to the early 1970s. It was built atop UNIX,"

So i know NOTHING about the internals of Ipad..but really how UNIX *is* an ipad?
Click to expand...

iOS (the OS that runs on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) is built upon Darwin. Darwin is, I understand, the UNIX certified component of macOS. I don't think iOS is UNIX certified, and I don't know how modified Darwin under iOS is.
 
TjPhysicist said:
So i know NOTHING about the internals of Ipad..but really how UNIX *is* an ipad?
Click to expand...
Both iOS and Android are based on various *nix kernels. Android uses a modified Linux kernel; iOS uses Apple's own kernel (which is a hybrid of Mach and BSD).

But does that really matter? There are many ways to define what is a "Unix" device. One is to look at the history of the source code: does it contain code from the various Unix branches (be they AT&T, BSD, Linux, Minix, ...). Another is to ask whether it is Posix compliant. I like the following two checks whether an OS is "Unix-like": First, can you log in from a shell window (either on a local hardware console, like the screen of my cell phone, or over the network, like with ssh or telnet), run a standard shell, and use normal Posix.2 shell commands, with a writeable file system and things in reasonable locations? Are the any functioning editors that allow changing file content (doesn't have to be a full emacs or bell-labs style vi, just something that works)? It turns out Android passes that test, although barely (I have never tried on an iOS device). Second, can you enter the good old "hallo world" C program (from the K&R book), compile it, and run it? Obviously, neither Android nor iOS pass that test. On the other hand, not all "real" Unixes pass that test either: Sun for a long time shipped machines with no compiler, and on the Mac you first have to install the (rather large) Xcode package to get access to a development environment.
 
Xcode doesn't cost money (at least it didn't last time I installed it, which was a few months ago on a new Mac). I think you have to have an Apple store account to download it (because all downloads come from the Apple store), and to open an Apple store account you have to have a credit card on file. That is slightly annoying. In practice, I think most users have an Apple store account anyhow, and most users actually spend a little bit of money there, so this probably makes little real-world difference.
 
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