MAC & BSD based of Unix...so does that mean compatibility?

[Justice McCay]

I am just curious since both BSD & MAC operating systems are based off of Unix, does that mean Mac OS-compatible software & programs will work & function correctly on BSD systems? If not, why not? Just wouldn't make sense that they aren't "backward-compatible," if that's the word to call it.

[bsdaddict]

I don't think that it will work "out of the box"... While BSD and Mac OS X have the same base (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X) i think that with each version the gap between them has become bigger and bigger.
See also :
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/free ... 01237.html (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2004-April/001237.html)
http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/w ... /arch.html (http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//arch.html)

And "Since Mac OS X is POSIX compliant, many software packages written for the *BSDs or Linux can be recompiled to run on it." i think this works only in one direction : from bsd towards os X. See Fink (http://www.finkproject.org/index.php?phpLang=en) and MacPorts and others. But i suppose it is possible to sort of reverse engineer mac os x packages to make them compile/run under bsd :)

[Fatmice]

:( ...you are so confused.

Rather me spending all my time explaining, I'd like to refer you to a nice website with good information about Mac (http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx//history.html). You should then be able to derive the word "compatibility" better.

To make it short, Mac OS software runs on top of Aqua and uses Cocoa. BSD is BSD...GUI from BSD runs on top of X11 and uses Qt,Tcl/Tk, or Nano, etc.

Another word, two birds of different kinds don't flock together.