Let's start by talking about GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I've used a few other graphics tools in the past including Adobe Photoshop (LE edition) and Paint Shop Pro and the height of awfulness, Windows'Paint brush. So I can say from this position of authority (not) that the GIMP is pretty good. It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux equally well. It supports layers, each with independent opacity values to dynamically composite an image. Text is treated as an object that can be easily changed. Bezier paths can be used for creating smooth paths and image selections. And I think the whole thing is scriptable (via Scheme) but I haven't gotten into that.
So the GIMP is pretty cool but what I recently discovered is that it's related to Mono... When I was messing around with Mono's implementation of WinForms (the C#.NET way to create Windows applications) I found myself using Fink to download and compile the source code for GNOME. Apparently Mono's WinForm implementation is tied to GTK+ and GNOME uses GTK+ as its base widget set which in turn is an offshoot of the GIMP project. (Starting to talk in circles here).
Now when I think about GNOME I think about Linux, but here I am running the GNOME desktop on my Mac. What's up with that? What exactly is Linux anyway? Well apparently what many people tend to call Linux (like a Red Hat distribution for example) isn't really just Linux. Linux is the kernel and the rest, the compilers, the bash shell, the command line applications, GIMP, and the GNOME desktop, are part of the GNU project. In fact, the GNU project was started in 1984 and Linus Torvalds didn't start work on Linux until 1991. The GNU project was working on a kernel too but Linus got there first. The Free Software Foundation even prefers people more accurately call it GNU/Linux with the GNU in front because they (quite accurately) are the major contributors.
So now I'm thinking well what the heck? How does BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution Unix), the base for Mac OS X, fit into all this. Well today's FreeBSD (from which OS X most heavily borrows), OpenBSD, and NetBSD distributions are descendants of the original AT&T Unix of 1970s. At some point in 1990s the BSD project attempted to free itself of AT&T copyright entanglements with replacements for all original AT&T Unix code. It was at this point that BSD came under legal scrutiny. It was under this legal ambiguity that Linux was created and prospered. In 1995 everything was squared away and BSD became truly free. And that's how we come to have two competing Unix-like open-source kernels. And it's probably because NeXT came before Linux that Mac OS X uses BSD.
Now if you throw out the kernel issue then I'm left with the impression that Mac OS X (sans Quartz, Cocoa, and all the other good Apple layers that sit on top) is more like GNU/Linux than I originally thought. Apple bundles a lot of the same GNU project stuff (like the compilers, the bash shell, the command line applications, etc). I'm even of the impression that because OpenStep ran on a host of other Operating Systems that if Apple were so inclined they could even put the Mac OS on top of Linux if they wanted. Ahhh Unix... I feel like such a newbie sometimes ;-)
Next time maybe I'll talk about all these crazy open source licenses: BSD, Apache, Copyleft/GPL, etc... Ahhh maybe not... ;-)
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