Open Sourced Mac OS

I have always wondered if someone could rebuild Mac OS because it is based off BSD. Am I right?

While it's true that Mac OS X is somewhat based upon a version of Linux [there's only about 250 versions] which is Open Source, some of the functions in Mac most likely are protected. There used to be a wannabe competitor of Microsoft who tried to develop Lindows but ran afoul of copyright/trademark issues, probably the same with Mac OS X [which may be dropping the X part in the future]. Since Mac OS X has been developed for Intel CPUs it probably would be easier than for the older PowerPC processors.

The Mac OS is based off BSD not Linux. Apple does it's own development but all contributors are given credit where credit is due. There have been Linux distros that have copied the look, Pear OS immediately comes to mind.

Edit: Lindows simply had to change the name of their distro to Linspire.

Guess I should have gotten more basic and mentioned that Mac OS and Linux and FreeBSD are related to UNIX.
Resources for Newbies
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ers/index.html

Actually, Solaris and Unix are related. Linux, Unix and BSD are completely different things.

Edit: Apple does maintain some things that Linux distributions use. That's the beauty of open source. Solaris changed hands when Sun was bought by Oracle and I believe the source code is no longer available. OpenIndiana was based on Solaris but it's pretty much a dead project now.