1.
Lame and seriously inaccurate; the XNU microkernel is under continuous development by Apple themselves, that should be a no brainer.2.Apple had their pick of Kernels with the fundamental tenant that the kernel they picked was something they had absolute control over, not something that some community had some control over and One Developer that's regarded as a God amonst that community has the ability to change at his whim. Not to mention the fact that the "benevolent dictator" of said project refuses to stablize the API; API/ABI Stability is the paramount neccesity for an operating system that is commercially distributed, it needs to be predictable to the tee under any configuration.
So no, Linux was never an option. The Mach microkernel was already being used in NextStep's implementation (Rhapsody), FreeBSD provided the rest of the patchwork bits they needed, and everything was licensed in a way that Apple could control. Thusly, XNU + FreeBSD became Darwin, and Darwin + Cocoa + Aqua = Mac OS X.
Just because there's another option growing, doesn't mean it's the only option.
Yep. Lame, inaccurate, and headline is misleading.'Nuff said.
That's essential to Linux having such a wide penetration, literally from cell phones to some of the worlds largest 512 CPU supercomputers -- it can keep evolving.
By the way, did you know that the DOS 3.0 API/ABI was such a success that Microsoft has not changed it since, and still uses it, unchanged and unextended, today at the base of Windows XP? Well, actually I am speaking sarcastically. This is blatantly not true.