Tenon MachTen

K

KernelSanderZ

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i wonder if you lot were aware of software made by www.tenon.com that first reared its head in 1990 called MachTen ? which was BSD4.4 on MacOS? if you visit the site you'll notice it is amazingly similar to this OS X product Apple is now pushing, to the point that tenon even have an ecommerce web-dev package called iTools(http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0010/03.itools.shtml)
...makes me wonder if Apple has been handing wads of cash under the table to keep these guys quiet, reminds me of the whole Xerox issue (http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~sjr/lisa.html) in the early 80s & the Windows look & feel drama of the mid nineties, anyone seen the movie "pirates of Silicon Valley"?. Although i'm sure some settlement has been made with Tenon, Apple don't seem very forthcoming in revealing the iTools name association & promote their product as the only bsdONMacOS solution.
Too a guy like me raised on a MacPlus & Solaris; Berkeley System developers are grossly undercredited for their work....

hmm.yes makes you wonder/.

anyone have thoughts on this?
 
Except NeXT did it in 1989, not 1990s. And OS X is based on FreeBSD 3.5... 4.5 *just* came out. Not sure which BSD you're referring to, but OpenBSD didn't even exist then, and NetBSD isn't close to version 4.4 yet...

Anyway, point stands. Steve did it before them with NeXT anyway, so they really don't have much of an argument.

Cheers,
Dak
 
Now that I've actually looked at the product, heh... it just looks like an emulator for FreeBSD 4.4 on a PowerPC. It uses all open source projects for the OS itself... FreeBSD 4.4 with XFree86 and KDE.

Cheers,
Dak
 
Actually.... I new about Tenon's iTools about the same time I started using iTools on OSX, and I belive it IS the same package mac.com uses and it's available to anyone who wants it.

I've been thinking of downloading it and giving it a try myself. :)

They seem to have some other interesting products that we may be interested in... hmmm...

Thanks for reminding me and for the link! :D
 
First MachTen is an environment that runs on top of the Mac OS (which makes it not completely different from VPC in some respects), and do nothing to add to the abilities of the actual Mac OS except in extending the numbers of applications that can be run on it.

Second, what settlement? Why would Apple and Tenon be at odds? And Apple's product is the only MacOS-ON-BSD-ON-Mach solution. BSD is actually only an interface/application environment layer on top of Mach.

Third, none of this is based on any of the Intel BSD clones (Open/Net/Free) because they all came after the initial version of NeXTstep (version 0.8). The BSD layer of that version was based on 4.3BSD.

And forth, iTools from Tenon is NOT the same thing as the service that Apple provides to it's customer. iTools is a set of server apps and a GUI to manage them. iTools on Mac OS X is a competing product with Apple's Mac OS X Server.
 
Originally posted by Dak RIT
And OS X is based on FreeBSD 3.5...
Click to expand...

Actually, no. The BSD layer of Mac OS X is based mainly on 4.4BSD and uses some libs from both OpenBSD and FreeBSD. All other versions of this OS (NeXTstep 0.8 to Rhapsody 5.6) use 4.3BSD for their BSD layers.

One of the factors that kept NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP costing $800 was the licensing of 4.3BSD (and licensing Display Postscript from Adobe, but that is another topic).
 
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