Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
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That would be getting interestingly circular or toroidal or something. OSX was essentially based on the FreeBSD userland and C library running over the mach kernel and under a different graphical layer, although I expect they've diverged a little over the past few years. FreeBSD itself has been able to run native Linux binaries for many years (in some very specific cases, with better performance than on Linux!) [1]. As a non Mac user, I don't think OSX can, because that's kernel level voodoo, but I am willing to be corrected.
Given there is, or at least was, already FreeBSD code in Windows too, and given the license is more amenable to commercial use than the GPL, it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they started with to pull this off (<-- that's me wildly speculating, however, I haven't looked at any of this in practice yet).
As to why they didn't go straight to Debian, probably the license wars that would occur. I've knocked heads with the DFSG and it makes Catch 22 look eminently sensible.
[1]
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...-advanced.html - it's a nifty trick.