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The MacOS userland tools were taken from FreeBSD, along with a bunch of other stuff, but saying it was 'based on FreeBSD' is a bit of a stretch.


NextStep pulled from Berkley BSD, so some of that lineage is still around. Darwin has pulled from both NetBSD and FreeBSD, themselves derivatives from the Berkley distribution.


A shared lineage is a very different thing, however.


Ancillary devices like the old Airport routers also used NetBSD


Until the last few releases, macOS also used IPFW, the firewall explicitly created for FreeBSD, so there was more FreeBSD in macOS than just userland tools.


Sure, and that's why I wrote 'along with a bunch of other stuff'.

Writing something like 'MacOS is based on FreeBSD' implies a situation more like Sony's OrbisOS, which isn't the case with MacOS.




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