There are
a lot of open source operating systems out there; being open source, they lend themselves to
forks,
clones or near clones, and
friendly offshoots. There are even services to let you customize, download, and (if you choose) bulk-install your own OS based on common components. Phoronix
notes a new project called
NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes, in part because of the developers behind it, and in part because of the positive thoughts many people have toward the aesthetics of
NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. (And while it might be a fork of FreeBSD, the developers
would rather call it a spork, instead.)
NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X. The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design.
You can watch a recording of the announcement as well as a longer introduction linked from Phoronix's story.