"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, [1]NextBSD , has come back to life under new management," [2]reports The Register :

> Aside from the homepage, there's a [3]GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is [4]still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a [5]project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as [6]pkgdemon . In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the [7]Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD . Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he [8]asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see [9]his list of commits .

>

> The original NextBSD project was started by [10]FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its [11]Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal.

>

> In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The [12]NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the [13]porting notes . Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole.

The [14]Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."



[1] https://nextbsd.org/

[2] https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/07/18/nextbsd-returns-to-dollop-apple-source-on-freebsd/5273788

[3] https://github.com/nextbsd-redux/nextbsd

[4] https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD

[5] https://nextbsd.org/#history

[6] https://github.com/pkgdemon

[7] https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/08/27/ghostbsd-2502-adds-gershwin-desktop-for-a-mac-like-twist/1313573

[8] https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD/issues/54

[9] https://github.com/search?q=org%3ANextBSD+author%3Apkgdemon&type=pullrequests&s=updated&o=asc

[10] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/introduction/#history

[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD

[12] https://github.com/nextbsd-redux/nextbsd

[13] https://github.com/nextbsd-redux/nextbsd/blob/main/PORTING.md

[14] https://nextbsd.org/#team