> The rumour is a sun exec let the cat out of the bag about it being the next main filesystem for osx (ie not just support for non root drives) and this annoyed Jobs so much he canned the whole project.
As others here have said Oracle bought Sun two years later. Between me increased memory requirements, uncertainty due to Sun’s status as an ongoing concern, and who knows what else maybe it really did make sense not to go forward.
The ZFS code was already released under the CDDL. What was stopping Apple from writing their own implementation like OpenZFS and FreeBSD, regardless of what happened with Sun?
Making a switch is one thing, but using Linux from the start for OS X would have made more sense. The only reason that didn't happen is because of Jobs' attachment to his other baby. It wasn't a bad choice, but it was a choice made from vanity and ego over technical merit.
You haven’t really expanded on why basing off the Linux kernel would have made more sense, especially at the time.
People have responded to you with timelines explaining why it couldn’t have happened but you seem to keep restating this claim without more substance or context to the time.
Imho Linux would have been the wrong choice and perhaps even the incorrect assumption. Mac is not really BSD based outside of the userland. The kernel was and is significantly different and would’ve hard forked from Linux if they did use it at the time.
Often when people say Linux they mean (the often memes) GNU/Linux , except GNU diverged significantly from the posix command line tools (in that sense macOS is truer) and the GPL3 license is anathema to Apple.
I don’t see any area where basing off Linux would have resulted in materially better results today.
Well for starters, it would have better memory management. The XNU kernel's memory manager has poor time complexity. If I create a bunch of sparse memory maps using mmap() then XNU starts to croak once I have 10,000+ of them.
Please re read the comment you’re responding to about how the kernel would have diverged significantly even if they did use the Linux kernel. Unless you think a three decade old kernel would have the same characteristics as today.
What benefit would it have had at the time? What guarantees would it have given at the time that would have persisted three decades later?
This presumes that Apple brought in Jobs as a decision maker, and NeXTSTEP was attached baggage. At the time, the reverse was true - Apple purchased NeXTSTEP as their future OS, and Jobs came along for the ride. Given the disaster that was Apple's OS initiatives in the 90s, I doubt the Apple board would have bought into a Linux adventure.
Why wouldn't Apple have been interested in a Linux option? They bought NeXTSTEP because of Jobs. Linux was already useable as a desktop OS in 2000, and they could have added in the UX stuff and drivers for their particular macs on top of it. There wouldn't have been any downsides for them, and it would have strengthened something that was hurting their biggest rival.
Not only was the acquisition during the 1990's, as someone that happened to be a Linux zealot up to around 2004, usable was quite relative in 2000, if one had the right desktop parts.
And it only became usable as Solaris/AIX/HP-UX replacement thanks to the money IBM, Oracle and Compaq pumped into Linux's development around 2000, it is even on the official timeline history.
In the early 2000's, Linux was practically unusable as a desktop OS because the only "fully functional" web browser was Internet Explorer. Netscape 4.x "worked" but was incredibly unstable and crashed roughly every half hour. Mozilla / Phoenix / Firefox wasn't done yet. Chrome didn't exist.
It was a very different world. We won't even talk about audio and video playback. I was an early Linux user, having done my first install in 1993, and sadly ran Windows on my desktop then because the Linux desktop experience was awful.
Jobs initially did not want to come back to Apple. Apple bought NeXTSTEP because between it and BeOS, Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand and was asking way too much money for the acquisition. Apple then defaulted to NeXT. Jobs thought Apple was hopeless just like everyone else did at the time and didn't want to take over a doomed company to steer it into the abyss, and it's not like NeXT was doing great at the time.
>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them
Really? NO downsides???
- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")
- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)
- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)
That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.
Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…
The investment Microsoft famously made in Apple in 1997 did not prevent Apple from going bankrupt. By the time the money was in Apple's accounts, its fortunes were already reversed.
The fact Microsoft announced they were investing, and that they were committed to continue shipping Office to Mac, definitely helped.
In 1996, Apple evaluated the options and decided (quite reasonably) that NeXTSTEP - the whole OS including kernel, userland, and application toolkit – was a better starting point than various other contenders (BeOS, Solaris, ...) to replace the failed Copland. Moreover, by acquiring NeXT, Apple got NeXTSTEP, NeXT's technical staff (including people like Bud Tribble and Avie Tevanian), and (ultimately very importantly) Steve Jobs.
The funny thing is so much of the advertising industry seems like embezzlement or fraud. So much of the time money is being pumped into this industry unnecessarily, things like Coke could not pay and suffer no loss in profit. It seems like some nonsense to keep money within first world nations or something. Just money going to a gamble which doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny as reasonable.
> In the US, a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support owning a house with a yard, a non-working spouse, a car, and multiple children.
That was never sustainable in the long run and no one can bring that back.
Well, we can't count on the entire rest of the world having all their factories bombed and being the only nation with reasonable manufacturing capability all the time.
The US was not an export-focused economy in the 50s and 60s. In fact trade as a percent of GDP bottomed out in those decades. Arguing that the prosperity for the average person was only "sustainable" in an environment where there wasn't foreign competition is an argument for tariffs.
In what way would the citizens of the US have been worse off had the rest of the world had reasonable manufacturing capability? I'd have thought that either it'd be the same, or better, because same production + trade.
It was the US benefiting from its position on the world stage as to why that was possible. The US was never and is not going to retain it's position on the world stage, and indeed under Trump it is radically declining.
The US is going to normalize with other western nations as we enter a multi-polar world.
The problem is Republicans don't accept that and think they can return to the 1950s.
It's hard to say exactly as the possibilities are endless and as I said originally I am not exactly proud of my vote to begin with. Some things that come to mind:
- Clear outperformance (in my judgment) by Canada / Europe as compared to the US (this would indicate policy failure on the part of the US to me)
- Large scale war of some sort beyond the level of carnage we are witnessing in Ukraine
> Imagine what the vibes would be on the West Coast if there was a huge set of policy changes that decimated and liquidated the high tech industries. All those software and engineering jobs just vaporize in a span of 20 years.
> Then the media makes you the butt of jokes. Calls you “flyover country.”
The people in your analogy are not the same types suffering from rust belt rage. One group is willing and very wanting to learn and grow and build, and the other is openly antagonistic to any sort of growth.
That's why they became flyover country. I don't think that would happen on the west coast if your scenario were to occur because of the different culture.
What can I say except: I don’t buy that at all. I lived in Los Angeles for 8 years and Boston for 5. There are some cultural differences but the people there are still just human.
When a region and a culture declines, it gets more nostalgic and reactionary. The arrow of cause and effect goes that way. Places like Detroit were innovation centers and much more culturally open before their entire economy was rug pulled.
If California were rug pulled you’d end up with a culture that lives permanently in the shadow of its boom times and rages at the world.
Damn. Because California has been rug pulled. The underground weed economy was responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in black market revenue. That money's now gone to Oklahoma because the legal cannabis laws are more favorable there, leaving a absolutely gaping hole in California's economy that can't be replaced by growing alternative crops like saffron, or, in keeping with the illegal theme, poppies/heroin or coca/cocaine. Because it was illegal before legalization, there are scant few stats on just how large it was, but where'd growers used to get $4,000/lb, they're now getting $400/lb. (I have this conspiracy theory level theory, in that San Francisco used to be home to illegal grow ops which forced pg&e to upgrade transformers and substations to support pre-led grow lights, which were massively power hungry. since that power is now no longer needed because those grow ops are no longer viable thanks to legalization, but the upgraded substations remain, the rise of electric cars isn't quite the emergency it should be.)
So much of the arts and Burning Man and entire communities in the Emerald Triangle were propped up by that money, and it's gone.
Time will tell how things go for California. I remain hopeful, but there's just no real data about the black market thanks to its very nature, so it's hard to know just how large that gaping hole is.
That’s fascinating. I always figured that real estate hyperinflation just drove all the arts and cool counterculture stuff away.
The upper Midwest had a lot of culture too. Disco (Chicago was a big place for that), Motown (named after Detroit), techno (also Detroit), industrial (Cleveland / Akron), and house music (Chicago and Detroit) all either came from or had large contributions from what is now called the rust belt.
That whole region used to be solidly Democratic. It drifted a bit R in the 90s and 2000s until Trump flipped it with one word: tariffs. Another quote I remember from a guy in Michigan in 2016: "when Trump started talking about trade... I'd die for this man. I don't care what else he does."
Different people have different reasons for supporting a politician, but for these people it's... I'm not even sure it's hope at this point. For some of them it's revenge. They feel lied to and betrayed.
I guess that's part pretty different from the old Cali weed industry. Nobody promised them anything. For these people the Democrats told them NAFTA would bring jobs.
I lived in Southern California for 8 years and I'd say that Orange County and parts of LA are at least as religious as Southwest Ohio where I now live, maybe more.
It's a different kind of religion, a different vibe, but there's not less of it. There's also a ton of new agey stuff in California that is no more rational or secular than old school religion, just different.
Boston may legitimately be less religious and less superstitious, but I'd be surprised if it was by a lot. Again, the religion is just different. There's a lot of Judaism, mainline Protestantism, and Catholicism up there vs. evangelical Christian and new agey stuff elsewhere.
So it's an issue of fundamentalism, maybe. Those areas like LA and Boston might be as religious in many ways as rust/bible belt places, depending on the metric, but they fundamentally are not confusing a day old zygote with a developed fetus, insisting the earth is literally 6000 years old and dismissing the idea we came from 'monkeys', they don't have issues with homosexualty to the same extent and maybe even belong to a church that is fine with it, etc etc.
> To the latter crowd, the kind of “bullying” behavior you describe is actually the equivalent of a gentle giant who never stood up for himself finally deciding that he won’t take any more shit.
Assuming this generous interpretation is accurate, then it's a problem of ignorance of the people holding this view. Characterizing other countries as 'freeloaders' is exactly that - ignorance.
Very petty if true.