The core of the OS is open source, but Mac OS X is not open source. They built the basics (the parts that do the real work) out of a version of unix that was free, BSD... They called this Darwin. Then they added lots of proprietary software (the bells and whistles) and call it OS X, thus making it non-free. They acquired all this when Apple bought NeXT.

I got into using open-source Linux (X11) software on Mac OS X by downloading Debian packages that were built for OS X with a program called Fink. After a while of getting used to the idea of X11 and how it worked I then decided to install Linux onto my main machine (Intel) and I've been using it ever since. My Mac was my webserver, so I left it that way for a while, but it was having some issues of dropping requests occasionally and I couldn't run anything newer than OS X 10.2.0. So I built a crappy old P200 into a temporary webserver running plain Debian (it was painfully slow) while I formatted and installed Debian on my Mac. It was a bit tricky because I have an oldschool Mac G3 333 (beige) and they don't like booting from the CD-ROM drive unless it's a Mac bootable CD... Anyhow, once booted it installed and worked perfectly, been up for 226 days now. My parents have the blue & white G3 350 and are still using Mac OS X 10.3

I think Linux has a big future, it's getting to the point where it's superior in many ways to Windows and Mac OS X, unfortunately it lacks some of the polish found in the commercial OS's but it's coming along, especially with some of the live versions, like MEPIS that don't even need to be installed to try out.

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