[ILUG] [OT] Mac OS-X Kernel

[Twomey_Mark at emc.com]

Hmm,
        First essentially what your talking about if you port Cocoa, is
porting NeXTSTEP's OO API's. I'm not sure if they are Publicsourced but it's
a possibility if your willing to sign up on their site and see. I seriously
doubt it however.

Now I'm not exactly sure how BSD and Mach are integrated but it has been
shown that the system is POSIX complaint. They just have not bothered to
have it certified as being POSIX complaint.  Terminal based apps that run on
BSD & Linux can be recompiled to run under OS X.

This all sounds fine so far but here's the problem..
For 2D screen graphics Cocoa uses the Quartz imaging layer developed by
Apple & ADOBE, for 3D it uses a rewritten OpenGL & for media it uses
Quicktime. I don't think any of those are open source at the moment and all
companies involved (Apple, SGI, Adobe) WILL sue if someone violates any of
the multitude patents and copyrights it's technology's hold.

As MS are writing App's using API's that integrate with Quartz, the
portability to BSD goes out the Window.
So yeah you could port Cocoa (If it's public sourced), but you'd have to
someway emulate Quartz in X-windows.     

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Dave Burke [SMTP:dburke at compsoc.com]
> Sent:	06 January 2000 15:16
> To:	ilug at linux.ie
> Subject:	[ILUG] [OT] Mac OS-X Kernel
> 
> Just followed the /. link there and was wandering thru the apple website.
> I was reading up about the kernel and how it "is based on Mach 3.0
> from Carnegie-Mellon University and FreeBSD 3.2". Pretty nifty!
> 
> And then I saw......"Mac OS X debuts with public pledges of support from
> more than 100 developers, including Adobe Systems, Microsoft, Quark,
> Macromedia, Palm Computing, id Software......"
> 
> So does this mean that M$ would be bringing out what is essentially fbsd
> products? (ok so IE for HP-UX already exists, but you know what I mean!),
> and yeah they'd probably be all linked into this new cocoa suite, but if
> you could port the cocoa libs, then thoeritically M$ could port any
> product off OSX onto fbsd/linux? Right/Wrong? I mean they probably won't
> but it does open the door for the possibilty and make walking thru the
> door even easier!
>