NextBSD Returns to Port Apple Source Onto FreeBSD

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register.

Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository - but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due.

The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original - you can see his list of commits.

Original Project History

The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 - its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD.

The NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code.

NextBSD-redux: A Fresh Start

The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though.

The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.

Key Approach

For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD - both the original version and NextBSD-redux - is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole.

Team and AI Involvement

The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code.

"From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."