OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 21st Oct 2011 23:17 UTC, submitted by jello

So, how serious is the legal battle between Apple and the various Android phone makers, really? Surely, it's just logical business sense that's behind it, right? Calculated, well-planned precision strikes designed to hurt Android where simply making better, more innovative products isn't enough? Well, no, not really. We already knew Steve Jobs took this personal - now we know just how personal.

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RE[5]: So I guess that...

by lemur2 on Tue 25th Oct 2011 06:05 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: So I guess that..."

Member since:
2007-02-17

OSX and Linux are very different systems. Both are based on Unix, but Mac OS X uses a different kernel called Mach, which was developed from scratch by Avie Tevanian, a NeXT engineer. Mach differs in design philosophy when compared to traditional UNIX and Linux kernels, as the former are monolithic, while OSX is a hybrid kernel.

To be clear, the Linux kernel was also written from scratch. The Linux kernel contains no UNIX code.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

In the diagram above, Linux is represented by the second column from the left. Unlike Mac OSX, Linux has no UNIX or BSD predecessors.

Unlike Mac OSX, Linux is not a certified implementation of UNIX.

The Linux kernel is UNIX-like, since it is designed to be POSIX compliant after all, but it is not UNIX, it contains no UNIX code, and it is not therefore based on UNIX.

The only thing which is more or less the same consistently between UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X are the BSD userland tools and X11 window system, which make you able to run UNIX and X11 applications on these systems.

UNIX userland applications will not run on Linux as there is no ABI or API compatibility. Error codes, for example, are different, because Linus mixed them up (unintentionally). X11 applications can run on Linux if they are re-compiled for Linux, binaries will not run. Bash scripts will run.

Edited 2011-10-25 06:16 UTC

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