“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,” Klint Finley reports for Wired. “It was built atop UNIX, the operating system originally created over 30 years ago by researchers at AT&T’s Bell Labs.”
“UNIX is the same software that gave rise to Linux, the open source OS that drives Google Android phones and underpins so much of the modern internet. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name,” Finley reports. “But Torvalds said ‘No,’ and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD.”
Finley reports, “Hubbard left Apple last month to return to the world of open source UNIX, taking the chief technology officer post at a iXsystems, a company that offers servers and other data center hardware that runs FreeBSD. Apple was quite an education, and now, he wants to bring the ‘Apple approach’ back to the open source game.”
Much more in the full article here.
Wow. Sounds like a hell of a guy. The open source world could definitely use some of that “Apple approach”.
FreeBSD = “lesser known”?!? Only if you’re born in the 90’s & clueless…
Oh come on… it’s not hard to argue that Linux is far more well known than FreeBSD, among both the tech crowd and the general populace.
Of course it’s lesser known.
Only to nubes (windows fans who “test the water” by installing linux in a partition, running it for a day and then becoming frustrated because it isn’t just like windows and then never touching it again)
Any “real” users (server or process farm admins) are likely as aware of BSD as they are Linux (what holds BSD back (and some of the better Linux distros like deb) is that it isn’t a “push button -idiot proof- install”)
Ooooh…. apparently I stepped on some delicate nube feelings eh?
So be it.
@Hint, Tessellator
“clueless”, “delicate nube feelings”
You can’t even discuss this utterly trivial point of whether it’s less known or not without jumping into sarcasm and name-calling. Please get a grip!!!
I have been accused (by many in my employ) of “not suffering fools gladly”.
What’s your turnover rate?
For entry level positions pretty high as you suspected. 😉
But for people who have been there longer than a year or two, pretty low.
Thankfully I am in a business where I get 50-100 qualified applicants for every open position and where almost all of my employees (myself included) would do what we are doing even if we weren’t being well compensated. (and many did)
With a job like that you need to bring enthusiasm and a passion for near perfection in what you do, nearly every day.
If you can’t do that, you get out of the way and let someone who can do it.
Sorry if that makes me sound short but I can’t stand when bullsh_t is being spewed as “fact” by people who don’t have a clue (one of my pet peeves -if you don’t know, then find out, and BY ALL MEANS -don’t say you do)
If I may say, Tessellator, I appreciate the tone of your response to me. I thought you were one of those guys who think constant name calling and insult constitutes discussion. Obviously you’re not.
Maybe this new company will provide the replacement for the Xserve that Apple terminated a couple of years ago? It seems to me that Hubbard has the knowledge needed to make OS X clients work seamlessly with iXsystems FreeBSD-based servers.
If it works out this way, then don’t be surprised if Apple seeks to buy iXsystems in the future.
The market for the Xserve never proved itself. Enterprise businesses remain Microsoft addicts. Apple give it a good long try! But if your intended customers are a bunch of sheep with no sense of quality or progress, what are you supposed to do?
Wishin’
and hopin’
and thinkin’
and prayin’
Plannin’
and dreamin’…
Apple moved on to far more fruitful things. Oh well! 😉
Thank You, Thank you, Thank You Linus Torvalds for saying No.
BSD + Mach = XNU Kernel for the win!
But Apple did have their own parallel Linux project called MKLinux:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
MkLinux is an open source computer operating system started by the OSF Research Institute and Apple Computer in February 1996 to port Linux to the PowerPC platform, and Macintosh computers. MkLinux is short for “Microkernel Linux,” which refers to the project’s adaptation of the Linux kernel to run as a server hosted atop version 3.0 of the Mach microkernel.
Is this more bad news for Apple? Another top dog making an exit? Short term anyway, it would seem so. Long term, if he increases the business world’s use of Apple, then it would be a giant plus for Apple. Do any of you know, if this is a big deal or not?
Not really. I think OS-X is now well established at Apple with coders and software engineers knowing how to work with it. I’m sure he would still consult with Apple and this just shows how Apple affects almost every industry and science in a positive way.
The Apple halo effect.
A great guy, but then, too, is Avie Tevanian, who left some time ago. What you don’t hear about are the many many stunningly brilliant software engineers at Apple who have taken the OS to where it is today and will be tomorrow. It is the culture that is important within the engineering circles, not the individuals. As long as the culture remains as demanding of excellence and elegance and ease-of-use for users and developers, Apple will be fine. OS X and iOS don’t crash because of John Hubbard, personally, but rather because every engineer *hates* crashes and works really hard to isolate and eliminate them. From Tim Cook on down the demand for excellence is really powerful, and not in a negative pressure-cooker way but from a cultural perspective of supporting one another to be intolerant of bugs and mediocrity in design and architecture. The pressure cooker accepted compromises when the company was on schedules like annual MacWorld introductions, but since Steve and the executive team moved away from that the deciding factor isn’t intro dates but rather completeness and refinement and quality expectations.
John will do really great things for his new employer.
I don’t personally see Apple buying a server company for any reason at this point. It’s just something that occurs at the scale Apple aligns with.
“UNIX is the same software that gave rise to Linux, the open source OS that drives Google Android phones”
Is very misleading (intentional??) Linux is NOT based in -or- on UNIX.
It was a hackers clone of unix (“poor mans unix”) a complete “clean room” copy without any kernel code (or want’t supposed to anyway) in common.
In my experience (and I own and manage a fair sized render-farm) BSD was and remains far more responsive and stable under crushing loads than the best of the Linux distros. (not to mention it’s superior thread management skills in multi threaded multi core environments)
I don’t know anything about code. I don’t understand what you’re saying it is.
How can Linux NOT be based on Unix and also be a clone of Unix?
In that it is NOT a descendant of UNIX
Correct. It grabbed the basic command names of UNIX, so it is UNIX user-friendly. But that’s about it. There is no UNIX code in Linux.
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/operating-systems/the-history-of-linux-how-time-has-shaped-the-penguin-1113914
Linux history is well worth reading.
Yes, it shares user space code with FreeBSD, but it is not FreeBSD. The kernel is still Mach, is it not?
Nope, Apple’s implementation is a Mach -microkernal-, not a kernel. (ie it is still a BSD kernel & kernel extensions.)
Using a microkernel gives them an abstraction layer between the kernel (BSD) and physical system assets. While this normally (in generic use) entails a (small) performance penalty Apple’s tight integration and control of both hardware and software allowed then to basically eliminate any performance hit.