nooby wrote:Is it true that the kernel is linux but the OSX is a kind of proprietary overlay in same way as Android has a Linux kernel and the Google part was to add teh Android proprietary overlay? maybe the word overlay is not proper word. I refer to what is needed apart from the kernel to make an OS.
Technically speaking, Linux
is the OS kernel (vmlinuz). The other stuff that makes it Gnu Linux are third party programs compiled to run under Linux and included in most distros. If it uses a Linux kernel, it's a Linux system. (My wireless router is a Linux system. There's an embedded Linux kernel under the hood.)
OS/X does
not use a Linux kernel. The OS/X kernel is based on BSD. It is not a Linux system, even though it includes many things found on Linux systems.
So the Phone that we should not name to in order to not boost it's ad presence on the net is more like a Brand name loyalty that has fanatic fans all over the world waiting for hours to buy the latest gadget from them.
Smartphones are fashion accessories. In most instances, the user gets what is considered cool, and may not be
aware of what OS is under the hood. Fine by me. Frankly, the users shouldn't
have to care what OS it runs - only what it can do.
Apart from that. First there was Unix and then there where BSD?
Correct. When Unix was created, AT&T was still a regulated telecommunications monopoly, and was not permitted to sell software. They
could give Unix away in source form to accredited educational institutions, and several universities took them up on it. In particular, the Computer Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley grabbed the code and started hacking. The end result was BSD Unix, or "Berkeley Standard Distribution". Various things that wound up in AT&T Unix originated there, like the vi editor and the C shell, both written by Bill Joy, who was chief architect of BSD and a computer science grad student. Bill went on to co-found Sun Microsystems, and unsurprisingly, Sun chose the BSD flavor of Unix for its early offerings.
BSD Unix found a home in university and R&D environments. Back then, you have to have an AT&T source license to run it, as it included AT&T code. In recent years, the AT&T code has been removed making is possible to redistribute without restrictions. There are three open source BSD variants at the moment - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. They all use the Gnu utilities and other things familiar to Linux - the difference is the OS kernel.
The split between AT&T Unix and BSD hampered the Unix world for years, as there were significant differences between them, and code written for one would not run on the other. The Solaris OS offered by Sun is the result of an effort by AT&T and Sun Microsystems, led by Bill Joy at Sun, to create a converged Unix OS that would reunite the two flavors. Unfortunately, it ran into opposition from IBM and HP who had their own Unix flavors, and never really became what was hoped for.
and then Minix for University courses and then Linux Thorvald?
Roughly. Minix was written as a teaching tool for courses in OS construction. Linus decided to use Minix as his starting point when he embarked on the development effort that became Linux, because he could get the code, and didn't have to start from scratch. Like Richard Stallman, Linus wanted a Unix like OS to play with.
an Stallman had visions and them made efforts to spread that message and we had Linux.
Linux happened to some extent
despite Stallman. Stallman wanted to have an OS that resembled Unix, but which would be freely available in source form. He wanted to create an independent OS kernel called Hurd. (See
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html for info.) While under active development, it has yet to achieve a stable release. Most folks use Linux or a BSD variant. Stallman has previously stated that the Gnu effort did not intend to adopt Linux as its official kernel.
But apart from Unix derivates and DOS derivates like Ms Windows there seems to exists no advanced enough OS that works for Desktops?
There's OS/2. There are an assortment of others. But the problem is that an OS is no use without software that runs under it. Users don't buy OSes. They buy tools to do jobs, and what they get will be determined by whether software exists that does what they need to do. The OS with the biggest base of software available for it wins. On the desktop, that's Windows.
Doesn't that mean that to make a OS is so extremely difficult that only two of them survived? I mean or else there would be 5 or 10 or 100 or more different OS but there are only these two that are well spread.
Yes, making an OS is difficult, but what you see now is inevitable evolution. Even if you had 5 or 10 or 100 different desktop OSes, the number would shrink, as a few of them became popular and that's where the development centered. See above about why users buy computers.
And while you
could decide to write a new desktop OS, why would you
bother? What would you be able to offer that doesn't already exist?
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Dennis