Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Declined to Join Apple

Post by zanst » Thu, Mar 29, 2012, 8:29 PM UTC

jonhendry wrote: post #68

robot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the book called 'Just for fun' by torvalds, you will find some details of this conversation. Jobs had to replace the notoriously old Mac OS design, with a new kernel. He had linux and BSD as the base kernels in mind. He offered the job to Torvalds to base the new OS on Linux. Linus, though did not want to build a closed source system, no matter what was offered. So he declined. Then Jobs had to base the n…

Uh, no. Jobs already had a Mach kernel, with a BSD user layer. And that's what they kept. I don't think Linux was ever seriously considered. NeXT's OS made heavy use of Mach messaging, and other features, that would be missing in Linux. The original article says the offer happened in 2000, which would be kinda late to be changing the OS X kernel so dramatically. And why would he need Linus to do a kernel when he had…