opensource

Interesting that Darwin, on which all of Apple’s operating systems are built, is essentially vanilla FreeBSD. Why doesn’t FreeBSD seem to have any polished user-friendly distros with heavy Mac inspiration like Linux does (Fedora, Elementary, Pop!) ? And why does so little of the benefit of MacOS’s success seem to have flowed back to FreeBSD development?

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The "backend" may be based on FreeBSD but none of Apple's frontends/apps are open source.

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

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Also one more note: Traditionally the "integrated" experience is owned by the desktop manager (eg. KDE, Gnome, etc). Apple did not use these. (Well, they technically did use KDE's Konqueror's rendering engine, creating WebKit, which it did share with the ecosystem, also used forked by Chromium as Blink, etc.)

Changing the license of FreeBSD to be less permissive would not have made anything better, just worse.

Apple made lots of contributions to the "backend" aspects, even when they didn't have to. If the license was more restrictive, Apple would have simply not used FreeBSD at all, and never contributed to it at all.

The "frontend" is completely separate.

Maybe an analogy: This is the difference between PostgreSQL and React, and complaining why did Meta who made React not contribute to making PostgreSQL as beautiful as Facebook dot com.

The fundamental part of the distro is the kernel, the init system (eg systemd), and the package manager (eg apt, yum, nix, etc). Traditionally, there is no prescribed window manager or visual UX at all with a Linux distro! 

"End to end distros" like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, Omarchy are more of a modern aberration than the rule. Distros like NixOS, Gentoo, Arch, Debian, FreeBSD, Slackware, etc do not prescribe an integrated experience like that.

Oh yes I know. I looked into all of this. I understand why from a licensing perspective why apple’s innovations aren’t ported back to FreeBSD but how has it received so little love in general. The website is hot garbage, the DEs, when there are DEs are usually busted ass versions of what’s available on Linux. It just seems so abandoned, and yet it’s not at all abandoned. 

I was actually wondering, how you think this squares with your argument about open source licences in your recent post. Couldn’t one argue Vitalik’s point here, that without requiring up streaming of value and code, the base product receives none of the value from the ecosystem it fosters?