Just imagine what Apple would do to the market if they also offered a full Linux support, but not Windows... They'd probably own some 70% of Linux market outright and also double its overall size overnight.
They already cannibalized a lot of Linux users, developers mainly when they released MacOS X around year 2000.
Suddenly you could have a Unix, with pretty much the same CLI as Linux but without all the supported hardware/driver issues. Laptop sleep in particular was pretty finicky.
If MacOS didn't pick a Unix/BSD base, I'm pretty sure all the tech companies running Mac would be on Linux.
I thought about it , but cloud is getting way more expensive since they don't own the infrastructure, while they themselves have long term components contracts that actually help to increase their margin on their hardware. So they're most likely gonna make more money off of hardware going forward. And nothing stops them from offering integration with other devices, effectively all they lose is potential income from AppStore on macOS, which doesn't sell much anyway. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me!
Does not accepting contributions make you not open source? I would assume if the license allows you to fork it, that makes it open source (as opposed to "shared source" licenses that basically say "look don't touch")
I feel like Apple wouldn't want to make full Linux work on their hardware, but they could enable their Darwin kernel to emulate Linux syscalls and provide a way to boot into a mode that basically loads the kernel and whatever Linux shell you want
> Reception was mixed, focusing on the difficult installation process and the significant performance costs of the Mach kernel. Reviewers noted its potential as a "Unix killer", but that it required users to abandon the user-friendly Macintosh experience for a pure Linux environment.
1996 is not now. This comparision makes little to no sense.
I'm sure if Apple provided support for installing your own OS on their M series laptops it would be incredibly popular. And I don't need to guess at this using weird 1996 research on microkernels because Asahi Linux exists and clearly there is interest in it.
Do you forget what Apple in '96 was? Or are you saying that Tahoe is too polished for the Apple of '96?
Apple was not a bastion of quality in the 90's. They couldn't modernize the Mac OS, and that continued with little more than window dressing over what was released in the 80's. The Mac line up was a horrible mess of barely different models that needed a Ph.D to figure out what was different. The company was bleeding money and seriously close to bankruptcy.
The Apple of the mid 90's wishes it could release something like Tahoe.
Ya ok, unless you looked at it wrong, then it crashed.
OS 8 was a platinum theme over System 7. Which was a slightly better System 6, which wasn't significantly different than System 4.
System 7 was good for the time, OS 8 and 9 were not, and Apples inability to improve the OS were really starting to show. Windows 95 was a more stable OS than OS 8. Tahoe is better.
Yeah - an OS that crashed every time you launched Netscape and you as an end user had to manually allocate memory to apps?
Not to mention that the OS itself was still mostly 68K emulated code even on PPC Macs and holding the mouse down over the menu caused all apps to stop running.
Apple circa 1996 would be charging for its updates and licensing out the software to Power Computing and UMAX. They were making a lot of "interesting" decisions.
