[OT] Apple's contribution to OSX

[Chuck Swiger]

Robert Storey wrote:
[ ... ]
> First off, apologies for this off-topic post, but I think this is the
> only place I'm likely to get an intelligent (and well-informed) answer
> to my question. I tried searching the web, but found a confusing and
> contradictory bunch of poorly-informed opinions, which wasn't helpful.

It's not clear to me that you are going to obtain anything different by asking 
your questions here.  :-)

> I'm writing a news article about Apple's contribution to open source. In
> particular, I'm interested in finding out the following:

You ought to ask Ernie Prabhakar, Wilfredo Sanchez, Jordan Hubbard, or someone 
like them at Apple.  Asking about what Apple has done for FreeBSD, or vice 
versa, is like studying one tree out of a forest.  People at Apple have make 
significant contributions on for the Apache 2, Java, Samba, GCC, and such, as 
well as to the BSD projects.

> 1) How much of FreeBSD did Apple actually use in OSX? If I'm not
> mistaken, the Darwin kernel is not related to FreeBSD in any way (or is
> that wrong?). Basically, what exactly did Apple gain from FreeBSD?

The Darwin kernel, Mach, is not related to FreeBSD in any way.

Apple mostly started with NetBSD improvements to their NEXTSTEP-derived 
userland based on an old BSD 4.3 version, and since have adopted many changes 
from FreeBSD as well.  Stuff like Unix CLI programs, various standard C 
library fixes and updates, IPFW, KAME's IPv6 stack, things like that.

> 2) What exactly has Apple contributed back to FreeBSD? (money?
> equipment? source code?). Nowadays, does Apple still continue to give
> anything back to the FreeBSD community?

I know at least one FreeBSD committer who is working at Apple, so I suppose 
that providing jobs counts as money...?  I don't know about equipment.  Yes, 
to source code.

Apple recently released a bunch of changes and fixes to the MS-DOS filesystem 
  compatibility kernel module, which someone here was looking over.  I'd 
imagine you could find other examples if you looked, to answer the second 
question.

> 3) How much of OSX today is open source (or "shared source")? Can you
> actually see the OSX source code? Can you use any of it?

Others have responded to this with URLs that are more useful, but "lots, 
except for GUI programs", yes, and yes would be my answers.

-- 
-Chuck