[geeks] Sun a possible takeover target - rumours

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 12:30:05PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> 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.  

OpenSTEP is the layers (rewritten and renamed BTW) on top of the OS.

The base layers is Mach and IOKit from NextSTEP, and 44bsd sits on that.
It's more than just userland binaries.  NeXTSTEP was a lot like that,
but had a 42bsd system on top I believe.  Also, MacOS X put IOKit and
Mach and 44bsd together to increase speed (not being real exact here).

> 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.

Solaris wouldn't be replacing OpenSTEP, it would be replacing 44bsd,
IOKit, and Mach.

That seems like a step backward to me, as Solaris driver support is not
very good, IOKit is supposed to be a nice driver system, and Solaris
isn't necessarily more stable.

I'm sure its possible, but some real improvements would be needed in
Solaris to make this any kind of advantage.

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