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By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.

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Correct, but to dismiss the NeXT contributions from BSD into modern mac and Darwin would be to dismiss Darwin entirely. Macintosh from the System7 days was a dramatically different beast.

I think the point is that Darwin wasn’t really a serious attempt to move Apple toward being an open source company.

Open source software was used for the basis of macOS for Apple’s convenience, not because Apple intended to publish very much open source software.

BSD has a convenient license for these purposes and it’s why proprietary commercial products like the PlayStation 5 choose to use it.

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