While the product was actually released more than an year after, on the 5th of April 2000, the move signalled a big change for Apple, which openly embraced the open source movement after the false start of MkLinux a few years before.

The announcement of Darwin (and of an open source version of QuickTime Streaming Server) was closely related to the the first version of Apple’s NeXT generation operating system, Mac OS X Server, announced in January at Macworld.

So in March, just a few days apart, Apple shipped both its new server operating system and at the same time released freely many of its core foundations.

Darwin’s birth and Apple’s push into the open and free world were initially met with mixed reaction, with many people not knowing whether or not to trust Apple’s motives and the Apple Public Source License (APSL) chosen for the source code. The license was modified at least three times and only in 2003, after being already accepted by the Open Source Initiative as an “open source license” it also gained the “free software license” status by the more stern and orthodox Free Software Foundation.

The Cupertino company eventually began to get acceptance of its open efforts, adding through the years many projects such as Bonjour/Zeroconf, WebKit and Calendar Server to mainstays Darwin and Darwin Streaming Server enduring to this day a fruitful although occasionally rocky relationship with the open source community.

In the original press release it is stated that

Mac OS X is built on the high-performance Mach microkernel and BSD 4.4, and includes the Apache HTTP web server and WebObjects application server

which were all features coming from the adoption of NeXT’s operating system.
This evolution, which was called “Rhapsody”, was modified in the interface to resemble the Mac OS and also had the addition of new and old Apple technologies such as NetBoot and support for ColorSync and QuickTime.

Mac OS X Server required 64MB of RAM, a 1GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive and supported all Power Macintosh G3 systems but was specifically optimized (and marketed) for Apple’s new blue and white G3s, also announced at Macworld 1999.

The product actually shipped in march at a lower price, only USD 499, instead of the “estimated” 999 mentioned by Steve Jobs in January during his Keynote.

In may of that year a promotional video was released in which Steve Jobs showed off the first Apple Store: in the last part the camera pans on the aisles and we can take a look at the main software offerings from Apple, still a mix of classic product lines and solutions coming from the NeXT acquisition.

From left to right you can see boxes of Mac OS X 10.0, Mac OS 9, AppleWorks 6, Final Cut (Pro) 1.2.5, AppleShare IP, AppleCare while in the lower part are Apple Media (blank) CDs and WebObjects 5.