That iPad in your hand? It feels like the most modern of computers. But like the iPhone and the Macintosh, the Apple tablet revolves around a core piece of software that can trace its roots all the way back to the early 1970s. It was built atop UNIX, the operating system originally created over 30 years ago by researchers at AT&T's Bell Labs.
UNIX is the same software that gave rise to Linux, the open source OS that drives Google Android phones and underpins so much of the modern internet. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs once tried to hire Linus Torvalds, the irrepressible Finnish coder who created Linux and gave the thing its name.
But Torvalds said "No," and not long after that, Apple hired Jordan Hubbard, the creator of FreeBSD, a lesser known, but still thriving, open source operating system based on UNIX. It was a better fit: Mac OS X shares conceptual roots with Linux, but it shares honest-to-goodness code with FreeBSD.
Hubbard left Apple last month to return to the world of open source UNIX, taking the chief technology officer post at a iXsystems, a company that offers servers and other data center hardware that runs FreeBSD. Apple was quite an education, and now, he wants to bring the "Apple approach" back to the open source game.
The trick with Apple is that the software it builds is so polished. Its operating systems don't feel like "tool kits." They feel like the finished article. Hubbard believes open source OSes should feel the same. "Most open source people make tool kits," he says. "They're good tool kits that have been used in everything from Tivos to phones, but they're still just tool kits."
It's telling that during his 12 years at Apple, Hubbard didn't contribute code to the open source project he himself had founded. In many ways, the sort of commercial software built by Apple is a step beyond the OS code that's shared with the world at large through open source projects -- especially in terms of the user interface -- and Apple is loath to give away its advantages.
But there's also a certain kinship between Apple and the world of open source operating systems.
Straight Outta Berkeley
The code at the heart of Mac OS X was born in the mid-1980s at NeXt Computer, the company Steve Jobs founded after his first stint at Apple. NeXt built a operating system based on two existing UNIX projects: Mach, from Carnegie Melon University, and BSD, created at the University of California at Berkeley. But on this base, they added their own, private code -- such as the Cocoa programming framework and a graphical user interface -- hoping to provide the sort of slick software environment pioneered by the Apple Macintosh.
Apple acquired NeXt in 1996, bringing Jobs back to the company. It was soon announced that the NeXt operating system would become the basis for the new Mac. Mac OS X, in turn, gave rise to the mobile iOS. Both Apple operating systems still include code files tagged with the NeXt name -- and both are directly descended from a version of UNIX called the Berkeley System Distribution, or BSD, created at the University of California, Berkeley in 1977.
The same goes for Hubbard's FreeBSD, as the name implies. Hubbard got his start with BSD in the early '80s as a high school student, and later went on to become a professional UNIX programmer. In 1993, together with fellow coders Nate Williams and Rodney W. Grimes, Hubbard created FreeBSD as a way of unifying the UNIX world, roping in code from the original BSD and a successor called 386BSD, created by a Berkeley alum. He and his partners wanted a single open source version of UNIX that would run on standard machines equipped with standard Intel chips.
"FreeBSD was born out of frustration because we had so many different versions of UNIX," Hubbard says. "Every one of them was different. It drove me crazy. I said: 'I could just develop my own and then make sure everything worked and was polished to some degree.'"