NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD

New maintainer revives the project with Darwin components, Gershwin, and Claude Code Liam Proven Liam Proven LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE REPORTER Published sat // UTC One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management. The Reg FOSS desk is intrigued. Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository – but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original – you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started -founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 – its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD. Darwin is the Unix foundation on which macOS and Apple's other OSes are built: it's open source and the code can be pulled direct from GitHub. Some of the initial goals are explained in this presentation from the original team. The reasoning goes like this… Apple's various operating systems, from macOS to iOS to the cut-down ones in the Apple Watch and Apple TV, are all built from a single common core, derived from NeXTstep. That was built on Mach and BSD UNIX, which were Free Software – the term "open source" didn't exist yet. Apple's OSes are sophisticated, highly developed, and are used in billions of customer-facing devices with next to no technical support. Today, much of Apple's OSes are open source. Along with the XNU kernel, which handles inter-process communication using Mach IPC, there's its init system launchd, IOkit for handling devices and drivers, the Apple System Log facility and its logging daemon syslogd, and much more. Although Apple shares much of the BSD-based text-mode parts of its OS, the lower-level parts – the XNU kernel and drivers – are designed and built purely for Apple hardware. When OS X was still quite new, there were various efforts to take the Darwin OS and build versions for PC hardware.