The rumors about Apple buying Pear OS were fuelled by the statement of a Black Lab Linux developer who said that he was going to “help Apple in a Linux endeavor they recently acquired.” Nothing was confirmed and users are still trying to find out what happened.
He refused to name the company, although he did say on several occasions that it wasn't Apple. Something happened a few months ago and, in January, the developer announced that Pear OS was no longer available for download and that an unnamed company had bought the distro and all the assets. To top it all off, like any good Linux distribution, Pear OS was free and the developer made constant updates to the system, more frequent than the OS he was imitating. Granted, most of the features were purely cosmetic, but the system worked and people really enjoyed it. The developer tried and succeeded in replicating most of the features that you can find in a Mac OS X. In the case of Pear OS, the situation was even clearer. For some reason, the guys at Apple and their community didn't think that someone redoing the entire Mac OS X system based on Linux was actually a compliment. Pear OS has had a very troubled history and the developer had to change the name of the OS a couple of times, not to mention the logo.
Pear OS, a Linux distribution that was built to imitate the look, feel, and functionality of Mac OS X, is still one of the most downloaded distros around.
