MacOS Operating System
Apple MacOS is a modern, proprietary Unix-Like operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., designed for Apple's Mac computers.
The base of MacOS (previous named Mac OS X, called "Darwin") is based on FreeBSD and Mach and still incorporates improvements from recent versions of FreeBSD.
Latest Release: macOS 13 (Ventura), as of 24 October 2022
License: Commercial, Apple Proprietary (see Apple SLA)
Written in: C, C++, Objective-C, Swift, Assembly language
First Release: March 2001 (MacOS rebranded from MacOSX)
Licensing Model: Apple Proprietary
Developer: Apple Computer, Inc
Platforms: PowerPC (from version 10.0 to 10.5.8), Intel X86-64 (from version 10.4.7 to 10.15).
The MacOS 11 and 12 are available for both: Intel X86-64 and the newer (arm64 platform).
MacOS downloads are not available at all.
The only way to get Apple's MacOS operating system is to buy an Apple Mac computer.
MacOS Screenshots
Darwin is the Unix-like foundation upon which MacOS is based
macOS (previously named Mac OSX) is based on BSD UNIX, which is open source. Apple releases its open source fork of BSD as the Darwin operating system. The XNU kernel that Apple uses is its variant of the Mach kernel, which is an implementation of UNIX.
The macOS operating system is a series of proprietary graphical (desktop targeted) operating systems developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers.
Free and OpenSource Software ported to MacOS:
There are many OpenSource / Free Software software applications ported over the years to the MacOS operating system by some extra package managers that are freely available such as: MacPorts or Homebrew
The both "Homebrew" and "MacPorts" projects are an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac operating system. To that end they provide an easy access to thousands of open-source software applications by greatly simplify the task of compiling (optional) and/or installing open-source software on your Mac.
