alt Hacker News> No, you just switched usages of the word "base" mid-conversion
The original assertion was: "Apple is BSD based". While we did move to assume Apple means macOS (iOS, et. al), we stayed the course with the remainder. There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
Regardless, what you may have missed is the additional context the followed: "not Linux". The parallel to Linux in macOS is XNU. Therefore, if other systems are Linux-based as we are to infer from the original comment, then macOS is XNU-based, not BSD-based. Yes, XNU contains some BSD code, but it is not BSD. It is very much its own distinct kernel maintained independently of BSD-adjacent organizations.
> This conversation isn't advancing anyone's understanding. It's just pedantry.
It could advance someone's understanding if they were open to seeing their understanding advance. I understand not everyone is accepting of new ideas and that many fear learning something new.
> There is nothing about macOS that is BSD-based. Containing some BSD code does not imply that it is the base. macOS also contains curl code. Would you say macOS is curl-based?
A decent chunk of the kernel was directly lifted from FreeBSD (and in bizarrely stubborn '90s-era design philosophy fashion, glued to Mach); some older stuff from NeXT came from earlier BSD codebases. I see 155 files in the ssh://[email protected]/apple-oss-distributions/xnu.gi repo that still have FreeBSD CVS version tags on them for some reason.
There is no curl code in the kernel. (If you want to be truly pedantic, and I see that you do, there is one shell script in that repo that assumes curl is installed.)