“Wilfredo Sanchez, member of Apple’s Core Operating System Group
and long time FreeBSD and NetBSD developer, spoke today at USENIX
2000 in San Diego, CA. His topic was “Challenges in Integrating the
Mac OS and BSD Environments.” This report is culled primarily from
hastily scribbled notes taken during the presentation. Included at
the close are a series of related links offering much more granular
discussion of the material presented in overview here.”
“The Macintosh has long been known to offer an optimal user
experience at the sacrifice of nearly everything else. As
such, it was designed to be a truly personal tool for each
individual user, not needing a central Administrator to oversee its
daily operations. Multiple user support was only formally
introduced in Mac OS 9 last year.”
“Unix systems, however, have long been known to offer
optimal engineering solutions at the sacrifice of nearly everything
else. They were originally released under early pre-cursors of
Open Source licenses, fostering a high degree of experimentation
among its users. These machines have historically been very
expensive to acquire and maintain, creating the need for resource
sharing among users.”
“Moving forward, the Mac OS will combine the best features
of both platforms while (hopefully) addressing their
shortcomings. Mac OS X will have a BSD foundation built upon
version 3 of the Mach micro-kernel. They have provided a
programming toolkit refined from previous versions of the Mac OS
called Carbon. A new user interface utilizing Display PDF is now
used called Aqua. Carbon provides a means to migrate existing
applications to the new code base.”