OpenDarwin Project Shutting Down

niabok writes "According to a message sent by Rob Braun to the OpenDarwin mailing lists, the OpenDarwin project will be shutting down, saying that 'OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.' The project's servers will remain online long enough to allow developers to move their various projects elsewhere."

Obligatory

I guess they needed more intelligent design.

At least there'll be some profit

With a PageRank of 8 and an age of 4 years, that domain will sell to some SEO company very VERY fast. I wonder what they'll get for it.

Quite Frankly....

Quite Frankly, I'm not surprised... It is well known that the OpenID project (Open Intelligent Design) is far more promising. For those who don't know, there is now a beta version dubbed "Kansas" slated to be released around Christmas.

Stay tuned!

Re:Quite Frankly....

Actually I think they'll be both trumped by the project affiliated with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course in some circles he is venerated as the Buoyant Spaghetti Deity; hence, OpenBSD [openbsd.org].

Sad

I personally use Fink (and love it, for all of its flaws), but it's sad to me to see a good alternative source for OSS on OS X bite the dust. The only reason I'm able to enjoy a proprietary OS like OS X is because of the availability of many of the best OSS packages (if not all), and the compatability this affords me with linux-based environments. Hopefully Gentoo on OS X [metadistribution.org] will go somewhere - does anyone know how it stacks up against Fink right now?

Re:Sad

Unfortunatley, it does seem to be hosted on the OpenDarwin servers, so I wonder what the long term plans are for the maintainers of the project. I hope it can continue to exist, as I for one would miss the nice ports style installation and management on OS X.

OpenDarwin was just a host for DarwinPorts. They will just find another host. The interest in DarwinPorts is high enough so that you don't have to worry about them disappearing.

Re:Sad

This isn't the end of the darwinports project. That project was just hosted on the opendarwin servers.

Re:Sad

Thanks, I misunderstood the announcment. Still sad though, Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS (though not Free Software because it doesnt' seem to like GPL stuff much, like many corporations).

Re:Sad

Ah, so BSD-style licenses explain why Apache, the various Mozilla projects, and Python have been total flops that nobody uses for anything.

Let's get real for a moment. Linux has become popular on servers for the same reason Java did, i.e. it generated a lot of press buzz, and has companies like IBM and HP pushing it to their customers (which they call "partners" to make things look cosy and pally). This means that the majority of corporate Linux setups (and by corporate, I mean any corporation, big or small) were chosen by people who don't know or care what the GPL is, have never heard of Stallman or the FSF, think a Gnu is a type of ungulate that lives in Africa, and would be happily using one of the BSDs if that was what their big "we take care of everything" hand-holding "partner" was telling them to use instead. Geeks within such companies have zero real-world input into any money based decision-making process, and use what they're told to use, hence the fact that Microsoft can sell them Windows and MS-Office for their their desktops, server-side Windows with Exchange for departmental services, Visual Studio for development, while Linux with Apache etc. live on their web server farms. If these people gave a fart about things like the GPL or what their pet geeks think is great, they wouldn't let anything from MS within a mile of their corporate buildings, and would be using open source tools to build their Linux-hosted webs instead of costly proprietary stuff like WebSphere and Tivoli, which are just incidentally supplied by those same "partners" who recommend, install, and support Linux.

The GPL is therefore no more relevant to Linux's success than a lack of it has been to the immeasurably greater success of Microsoft's products. It is popular on servers because it works, is free as in beer, leverages existing corporate UNIX expertise, and a lot of business people have heard of it thanks to their everything-including-the-kitchen-sink IT service "partners", whereas few have heard of the various BSD variants. By the same token, it is a flop on the desktop because, for far too many non-geeks without access to a geek, it doesn't work properly with the hardware they have, fails to leverage their (albeit minimal) expertise with other operating systems and software, and most consumers either haven't heard of it, or know the name but are extremely hazy about what it is.

Re:Sad

I think you're really missing the point. Consider the reasons why Open Darwin failed as a project. They couldn't generate the community interest and involvement necessary to further the project. This in itself is surprising, because OS X has a relatively large userbase, and is different enough from other *NIXs to be interesting.

So why was nobody interested in Open Darwin? Because it's Apple's product. There is no sense of community ownership, or community involvement, working on Open Darwin amounts do doing free R&D for Apple. Moreover, Apple won't even release the really interesting parts of OS X, and can, at any time (as they've demonstrated with the x86 release), withhold code if it is convenient for them to do so.

It's naive to believe that GPL vs BSD has nothing to do with the failure of Open Darwin. If the BSD code had been GPL'ed, Open Darwin could be a true community project. Apple wouldn't be able to withhold code at any time, it would have to release interesting kernel drivers, and they couldn't take peoples' changes and close them back up later. Of course, that is not to say that just GPL by itself would've compensated for the complete lack of tact with which Apple approaches its open source projects, or that this occurrance is necessarily the fate of all BSD licensed projects, but rather that this event is a textbook demonstration of one of the shortcomings of the BSD license.

Re:Sad

This is the kind of nit-picking I hate on Slashdot. He didn't say "while avoiding giving anything back to the gcc project", he said "while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project". He qualified the word "anything", and you've responded as if he didn't.

Objective C was close to useless for the longest time in GCC, which adopted Apple's changes largely, I think, in the hope someone would make it a viable system in the future. A crude object framework consisting of just the Object class was added (note: not NSObject) and a small run-time, by independent (non-Apple) developers, but until GNUstep came along there was nothing you could really do with all of that unless you spent a few months developing a basic class library. Basic meaning pretty much "everything". No string classes, IO classes, or anything else, existed unless you chose to write it.

Re:Sad

Speaking of history lessons and facts, let's not forget that RMS needed to due everything short of suing NeXt to open the Objective C compiler's and runtime's sources:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.html [fsf.org]

NeXt didn't want to contribute their code back to the Free Software movement. They even had some sneaky attempts (shipping just the .o files) to keep it proprietary. Only when lawyers got involved, did NeXt release their changes. They gave something back to the gcc community only when a gun was to their head.

Fink is not out of Date!

Fink mirrors the Debian release cycle so you have stable packages whiich are generally a few versions behind current and unstable (which I have always fount to be stable) which are generally bleeding edge. The unstable release of Ruby is 1.8.4 which is current.

To configure Fink to use unstable, edit /sw/etc/fink.conf, add unstable/main and unstable/crypto to the Trees: line, and then run fink selfupdate; fink index; fink scanpackages.

You should now find you have more than 5000 packaes instead of 1800 to choose from and the latest version oof PERL, Ruby, KDE etc. are all there. You will have to update all your old packages to use them though, with Fink you can either choose stable or unstable, not a mixture. Having said that I have over 1000 unstable Fink packages installed on this mac aand they work fine.

Happy finking.

Sorry, but...

Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.

Sure, they ported fink and some libs to Darwin, but that's pretty much it. ODP has been dorman for years, since 2002, pretty much.

Is Apple to blame for their luck of support? I do not think so; since they do have a neat thing going with http://developer.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]

Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means.

You're correct that that which makes OSX OSX is closed source, but it's not just the GUI. The whole Cocoa and Carbon API is closed. It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM, .NET*, etc closed. It's fairly meaningless. OSX is "proprietary", period.

* The CLR part of .NET is open as the Rotor code; I refer to the closed parts of .NET (WinForms, WinFX, etc).

You're mistaken, Apple does release tons of code

To me open-source means that you have to release the source one way or another, and Apple doesn't release any piece of source code.

Uhm... You're mistaken [apple.com]. Some of Apple's open-sourced code:

• Darwin
• Darwin Streaming Server
• Bonjour
• WebKit
• Compiler Tools
• HeaderDoc
• OpenDirectory
• OpenPlay

And of course, there's more, in addition to all the other existing open source components which they use and contribute to.

There's even more which they don't release, and you can like that or not (it's a business decision to them), but you can't claim that they don't release code.

Re:Sorry, but...

Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.

They really missed the point. Darwin was never intended to be yet another open-source UNIX derivative like Linux or the BSDs. Its whole purpose was to make life a bit easier for people writing drivers for Mac OS X, so when they started beating their chests about how Apple was oppressing them, those of us in the Mac community bascially said: "Umm, who the fuck are you anyway, and why aren't you just using Mac OS X or Linux like a normal person would?"

-jcr

Sad but not unexpected

Apple never supported the open source version of darwin in any way beyond lip services, some server space, and releasing source packages in mostly unbuildable form. They took from many open source projects but returned precious little to the community. At the end of the day Apple does what immediately benefits Apple. It's sad, but it's likely the threat of hacking OS X to run on white box computers likely is the greatest reason for Apple to not release vital parts of the latest OS X source code. Yet this will still happen. In the meantime, Linux continues to grow and become better all the time. There just was no need for OpenDarwin without Aqua. If all you want is a unix-like OS to run servers, Linux suits the bill just fine.

Re:Sad but not unexpected

Ah, so there's the problem. There were several missing link libraries.

Re:BSD's fault.

These licenses [X11, BSD, MIT] don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.

Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?

I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.

Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.

Re:BSD's fault.

Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?

Becomes part of the commons -- and stays there.

I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.

I don't know what the true motivations of the GNU Foundation are in promoting the GPL, but I do know mine. Software that I have released under the GPL has not been political. It does something I find useful and that I think others might find useful as well. At the same time, I put some work into it, and if someone makes improvements I would like to be able to use them. If I wanted instead to be sure I got credit I would use the origonal BSD liscence or one of the many other ones that require attribution.

Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.

When you release something to the community with the intent for it to be free, is it selfish to want it to remain free?

Re:BSD's fault.

they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.

Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.

but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.

Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.

With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.

Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.

Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.

Re:BSD's fault.

...what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems?

GGP said:

Linux has not yet come close to hitting the tipping point on the desktop for the typical semi-technical user. With Apple's help, it would be much closer. With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.

This does sound to me like someone blaming BSD for Linux's (perceived) problems, and I agree with GP that it's a pretty sad assertion. I don't agree it's an attitude that can be generally attributed to 'extreme [GNU/]Linux zealots' - most I know would consider any negative opinion of the Linux desktop to be heresy, and any hypothetical Apple assistance would be derided as an undesirable dumbening of self-evident UI perfection.

Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programmer.

If I were a better programmer, I could make the project I've wanted: an update of GNUstep to be more library-compatible with OSX, and an OS using it with Darwin.

-uso.

Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme

Qt is internally a work of art

This is precisely why GNUStep gets no traction: the Linux crowd actually believes that a cross-platform abortion like Qt is acceptable. Of course, this isn't surprising for a community that still hasn't admitted to itself what an abomination X11 is.

-jcr

DarwinPorts

I wonder what will happen to DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org].

Apple has been pissing me off

I work with a lot of users and all they talk about is how great it is but when I mention Linux they respond with "But OS X is Linux" I try to tell them that OS X actually uses the BSD kernel with some parts of open source projects(mostly KDE) but they say "same thing" it really pisses me off(especially as a Linux user). I cannt imagine what the BSD developers/users feel. Anyway I always though the Apple commitment to open source was half-ass/shady. blah I just hope more Apple users smarten up and switch to Linux or a real BSD system.

Re:Apple has been pissing me off

blah I just hope more Apple users smarten up and switch to Linux or a real BSD system.

And I hope more users get over the whole macho thing and give up using an OS where every trivial little task becomes some monumental quest where you have to prove yourself worthy by constructing scripts, .rc files and kernel configurations, and switch from BSD and Linux to MacOSX. But that's just my opinion.

I wonder

I wonder if they're afraid that people would try to use the opendarwin kernel with mac os x for intel to run the whole thing on any machine.

Re:I wonder

Yep. As soon as Intel Macs came out, they stopped updating the open version of their kernel. Goals? I don't think goals had much to do with it.

Bruce

Don't fret.

I started out using Fink [sourceforge.net] but it never felt quite right. Then I tried DarwinPorts and I've been happy ever since. As a result, when I saw this story my first thought was, "What will happen to DarinPorts?" I checked the Darwinports Mailing List Archive [opendarwin.org] and found this [opendarwin.org] comforting post. To summarize, DarwinPorts is alive and well and will continue. Time to start using www.darwinports.org [darwinports.org] rather than www.opendarwin.org.

now is the time...

to switch to GNU Darwin (http://www.gnu-darwin.org/)
I haven't used it myself, but it seems to be more of a full system (with GNOME and WindowMaker) and more actively developed than OpenDarwin ever was.

Merely the latest in a long run of OSS failures

OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.

Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.

So much for OSS "community" stepping up to the plate. What, is it only if you're taking on Microsoft that you guys give a damn about a project? And it's not a shock that many of you OSS devs were mooching off of OpenDarwin's servers to host your insignificant little projects, while contributing nothing to the OpenDarwin project itself.

Obvious question...

So, what were it's goals?

Dave

Goals and an open source project

In my experience, the 'achievement and goals' mentality seem to stem from a corporate-culture, while open source projects generally have a vision but the vision can change over time and the 'goals' change with the community. In general what I've noticed is that projects that concern themselves with the community rather than the goals tend to stay afloat longer than those that have a directive. If opendarwin became a place where osx-focused oss projects were housed / referenced, then why call that a failure? Perhaps it wasn't what the creators of the project had in mind initially, but it seems pretty unfortunate to loose this resource in the community.

Survival..

of the fittest. Darwin was right yet once more then..

The way it is

Having used both Mac and Linux. I've come to this conclution. Linux is powerful. Mac is powerful. But lets face it guys when was the last time you had to stay up all night getting an freakin program installed on a Mac?...that wasn't open source "cough". Linux works well as a server not a desktop and even then a simple sudo yum update on a production box can blow away the config files you spent 4 days setting up don't say you've never had any "simple" problems with linux also there not even one server management package that comes close to Apple's on Linux. Here is the way i look at it say you want a barn. You have two options you can buy one that is already made and start using it the way it was designed start being productive or you can build one which you may not know exactly how to so there's alot of stuff to learn and figure out before you're ever able to use it. There's an infinite amount of ways you can build it which has its benifits and disadvantages. Main disadvantges being time and energy. Apple has its "way" of doing things, because of this it is easier to control what you are able to do. When you have control you have stability. Now some of you may say blaaaa thats why we use OSS. Everytime i've gone to do something on a mac there's hardley ever a better way to do it than their way. WHICH WORKS!! at any rate some how i'll suffer through my Quad G5 with 8gigs of ram and my 30" Cinema Display with my working NVIDIA graphics card drivers......ohh pooo i wish i could have a fancy linux box :-P Pile of wood or Amish construction!!

One more aspect of evolution:

They haven't failed. They've just found a way that doesn't work and leads to death. All part of the natural consequences of evolution.

Where will their mascot go?

But some are asking, what will happen to the Open Darwin Project's adorable mascot? With the project coming to a close, the outlook for all is bleak.

  Oh! This just in: lovable OpenDarwin mascot Hexley has signed a deal with Diz Nay Studios, and will be starring in a series of cartoon platypus porn films, presumably in order to pay for a much-rumored PPC addiction.
  Our hearts go out to poor Hexley in this dark time.

What a pity

For the last couple of years, I have stumbled upon OpenDarwin once every 2-3 months and thought I'd really love to install and use it at some point. However, I always looked at the hardware support list and decided it probably wasn't ready.

But there was always the dream..

And now it's gone..

Not surprised.

If anyone had been keeping up with Rob Braun's musings about Open Darwin and Apple's behavior with the OS community, this decision was simply not a matter of 'if' but 'when.' The following links below illustrate that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision but rather the final straw:

A Brief History of Apple's Open Source Efforts [opendarwin.org]
WebKit and Apple's Open Source Efforts [opendarwin.org]

Those are just for starters. And to top it all off where Braun gets to the meat of the matter:

Why Darwin Failed [opendarwin.org]

It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to figure out that the holdouts on the Darwin project have finally had it with Apple.

In a nutshell: Apple have never let anyone touch their code which is a twisted beige box-grade edition of FreeBSD. If something burps no one can help outside of Cupertino. Worse, Apple deliberately makes it nearly impossible to report bugs and allow for patches to be made. This extension of Jobs' secrecy policy is why some holes remain wide open while the rest of the *nix world have patched them a long time ago.

With OpenDarwin shutting down not too long after Apple closed down OSx86, Apple execs selling Apple shares all over the place, and the exodus of two former NeXT gurus, it isn't hard to see what path Apple and OS X are heading down.

Go ahead and mod me as a troll for preaching against the Gospel of Steve, but if key players both at Apple and in the developer community do not believe in OS X (or are giving up on it entirely), how can the rest of us do so?

How long till OpenSolaris goes the same way?

I say they'll muddle on for another year.

Misguided

Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.

Their dreams being that they would create an open source project, and everybody else would do the work for them.

How to spell "Mac OS X"

Sorry to nitpick, and I realize that this isn't contributing much to the discussion, but for the record it's "Mac OS X" written just like that, with the capital letters and spaces as written. It's usually abbreviated to "OS X" but never MAC or OSX.

I believe part of the confusion over this is that it used to say "MacOS 8" on the startup screen, but since then Apple has clarified the way it is to be written.

fortunately Darwinports is separate

The good news is that darwinports [darwinports.com], while related to OpenDarwin, is a separate project, and James Berry indicated on the mailing list that porting efforts could continue on.

Re:So they're changing the name to

Or OpenIcthus.

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

No need for amarok, just do this. ls * > ./playlist && mplayer -shuffle -playlist ./playlist Or ls */*.mp3 > ./playlist && mplayer -shuffle -playlist ./playlist :) mplayer for life, bitches.

Sorry, nice try.

Linked site says "Page Not Found"

Re:What a surprise...

Nevermind that Apple employs many people responsible for FreeBSD Development too...

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

You could use Linux and use wine or cross over to run the win version of iTunes.

Re:What a surprise...

Somehow I don't think the end of OpenDarwin is going to mean Apple will stop lifting code from the BSDs. Why should it? BSD is not and never has been about creating a world seperate from commercial software. They're not "lifting" the code, they're using it according to it's liscence, which is something nearly every vendor, commerical or not, does, if only for OpenBSD's ssh implementation.

Re:What a surprise...

The point is that Apple has been saying what great OSS supporters they are, and now they are even discontinuing the tiny bit of code sharing they have done.

No, they are not. Apple's code sharing has always happened via its own website [apple.com]. OpenDarwin was not run by Apple, although several Apple engineers supported and actively participated in its various projects.

That doesn't mean that it's sad that Apple has not been able to create a satisfactory policy which allowed external developers work directly on Darwin and contribute to it. It's not like they can't do it in general, as in case of the WebKit project some external developers even got direct commit access (which is more than what the OpenDarwin people wanted, afaik they just wanted their fixes to be incorporated by Apple).

I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...

Re:What a surprise...

Somehow I don't think the end of OpenDarwin is going to mean Apple will stop lifting code from the BSDs.

If the BSD developers cared about their code getting "lifted," they wouldn't have released it under the BSD license, which was designed to permit exactly that. That's sweet that you're offended for them, but you don't have to be.

Also, to clarify, OpenDarwin was the community-driven fork of Darwin. Darwin itself is still open-source (which the BSD license does not require).

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

http://www.musicpd.org/ [musicpd.org] is wonderful.

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

Why not Amarok?

Not a flame, just curious. I actually prefer it to iTunes...

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

I'm not sure I can take an article seriously when the author does not know the difference between then and than.

Re:Why Fink and Darwinports?

Dependencies.

Would you rather simply tell Fink you want Gnucash and it does everything for you, or would you rather try to figure out and install all the dozens of dependancies yourself?

Just like the difference between Linux From Scratch [slashdot.org] and Gentoo [slashdot.org].

Re:So what? OSX = platform for SSH.

Even for an AC, this gets my vote for dumbest post of the week. Both OT and inane, and extra credit for throwing in Craigslist. Well done!

Re:GNAA

meh- karma to burn. If you're not sick of GNAA shenanigans, you haven't used the internet long enough.