Apple set itself up for defeat in the server and developer marketplace as soon as they decided macOS was proprietary code.
Why would any serious developer use closed-source code they can't debug and modify? Especially for a production server?
It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS, like part of the point of being a developer is being able to dig into the code at any layer and debug and fix things.
OpenDarwin was a thing at one point, with mailing lists and other infrastructure hosted by Apple.
That being said, my point isn't that Apple should absolutely focus on making a server OS again. It just saddens me how far behind macOS has fallen as they stopped caring about the fundamentals; back in the day, it would be Linux trailing behind macOS. Nowadays, you can't even have multiple routing tables on the latter, the firewall code was probably last updated in Snow Leopard, and what Apple happily shows off on WWDC is a wrapper around Linux. Something functionally equal can be cobbled up together by anyone sufficiently experienced in minutes, using just Bash, OpenSSH, and QEMU.
I really wish macOS would let me have a similar level of control over applications as Linux with namespaces, without me having to do all the heavy lifting.
Apparently game, desktop and app devs aren't serious.
No offense, but serious developers don’t think this way at all.
> It's the same reason no serious developers or hackers use macOS
I know I'm basically taking the bait, but I guess I've not been "seriously" developing stuff for the past decade or two, which is news to me!