[geeks] Sun a possible takeover target - rumours

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Thu, 8 May 2003, Michael Schiller wrote:

> As somebody else already mentioned, I would like to see Sun & Apple get
> together. I think the 2 companies would complement each other rather
> well. Of course the other thing I would like to see, but probably
> wouldn't happen would be for them to then replace BSD with Solaris as
> the underlying OS in OSX, that would be a kick-ass OS, the stability of
> Solaris with the ease of use of OSX!

Actually, it's not really BSD underneath.  It's OpenStep.  They just
borrowed some of the FreeBSD userland binaries.  Removing the OpenStep
from OS X and replacing it with Solaris would be impossible, if they
wanted to keep any semblance of compatibility between Solaris and OS X.

Now, if they'd find some way to replace the Mach kernel with SunOS and
make the IORegistry a skin over /devices, that would be exceedingly
tasty.  You'd have SunOS, with a pretty face, and back too its roots
with BSDish userland binaries.  The only sore spots would be the OpenStep
way of doing things and NetInfo.

However, all that said, I think OS X is a damn fine OS as it is.  It's
very stable (aside from having a rather fragile IDE implementation), but
probably not as scalable as SunOS.  If there were a NetInfo<->NIS
bridge, they'd coexist quite happily on a network.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke *) "The grabbing hands grab all they can, all for
Thorndale, TX     (*  themselves, after all, it's a competitive world;
                  *)  everything counts in large amounts."
                  (*                --Depeche Mode "Everything Counts"