| Thursday, February 14, 2002 |
09:53 - Some Ernest Talk at BSDCon
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24060.html
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The USENIX BSD Conference has been the site of some fairly entertaining dialogue from Apple, particularly Ernest Parkabar, according to The Register. This includes numerous interesting barbs at Linux and Microsoft, and colorful metaphors (bringing Mac OS X up to FreeBSD 4.x status is "like porcupines mating").
There's the to-be-expected smirking about how BSD is now three times more popular on the desktop than Linux; but more interesting is the general tone, that Apple has sent two staffers (including Jordan Hubbard) to cement the company's ties to the BSD community and to encourage X11 developers to bring their apps to Mac OS X.
This should actually be a pretty easy sell. All the tools are there; Aqua and the Interface Builder are surely more attractive development foundations than fighting with X. To say nothing of the much bigger potential market (though that market is of the willing-to-buy-Apple-hardware set rather than the build-a-cheap-box-from-parts-at-Fry's set).
Something that's bound to be attractive in any case is the preemptive multithreading than Mach offers. Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD all have preemptive multitasking, yes-- that's a fundamental feature of any UNIX. But preemptive multithreading (the ability for individual programs to efficiently run many tasks at once) is something that only Mach has in a mature state-- it's been built-in since the beginning. Linux is only just now starting frantically to try to stack it on top of the already Gothic-looking kernel; FreeBSD is further along in its efforts, but it still isn't at a really usable level. So that's a definite plus point.
At any rate, it's definitely good to see Apple maintaining its commitment to that whole "Hey, we've got UNIX inside!" thing they've been touting. And Parkabar sounds like he's a hoot.
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