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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

how is MacOS to a much less extent?

Actually you're right... it isn't.

I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.

is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix

No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.

You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).

For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.

Doubt it. There are still dozens of frameworks that still link to OpenGL, and Apple’d need to drop or update them all in a year. Most likely it will remain on the system for at least a couple years.

You'll still be able to use MoltenVK to get Vulkan support, and SDL will still work for windowing and everything else.

I was just referring to the "lesser degree" of being proprietary

OS 10.4 was the last version to support classic mac apps - https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-confirms-no-classic-support-...

Mojave is the last version of OSX to support 32 bit applications ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/05/mojave-is-apples-... )

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Essentially, all software has a end of life. I'll grant that Apple has done work to maintain their software across major processor and operating system changes, but at some point that support is dropped.

Yes. Well, since 2002 some old versions aren't, but v7 onwards is. macOS is based on XNU and NeXTSTEP, which are based on Mach and BSD, but macOS is not solely a Unix system and few use it as such. In fact, if you were to make a program using only the FLOSS unixy parts of macOS, porting it to other POSIX systems would likely be trivial. I hardly even count that as "macOS software" in the exclusivity sense.

macOS being unix-based doesn't make it less proprietary. z/OS is Unix certified and proprietary as balls.

People forget that actual Unix descendants are really mostly proprietary. Linux and BSD are what we often think of today, but those are really more "Unix-like's" and many of the "true" Unixes tend to be proprietary systems like AIX, HP-UX, IRIX (now deceased), z/OS etc.

The bare core of macOS (Darwin) is open source, but pretty much everything people identify with macOS is proprietary code built on top of Darwin. You used to be able to get standalone distributions of Darwin (maybe you still can?) that people built from Apple's source and they were almost completely unrecognizable.

It's only completely unrecognizable because Darwin is the kernel and userspace. The UI is whatever you want it to be.

Right, that's my point. What most people associate with "macOS" is actually the stuff layered on top of Darwin, which is mostly proprietary. It's not just the GUI, it's also a lot of the frameworks and libraries as well.

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