OpenDarwin Project Shutting Down 470
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 (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
Netcraft confirms it (Score:2)
Listen, it's been over twenty minutes since this story was posted, and I haven't seen a Netcraft confirmation post yet. How do I know it's really dying? C'mon, people, get on the ball.
At least there'll be some profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:At least there'll be some profit (Score:2)
Re:At least there'll be some profit (Score:3, Funny)
It's take more than a good pagerank to make a name valuable. The name itself has to mean something. There are porn folks who'll buy a popular name just to grab they extra hits, but they're not going to pay very much for it.
Then I guess they should've named their project "Open Darwina". Oh yeah, open wide for me baby...
Quite Frankly.... (Score:4, Funny)
Stay tuned!
That was the best slashdot gag in a while... (Score:2)
I tip my hat to you on that one, even though it should have been obvious, ya got me....
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:2)
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:3, Funny)
adj.
1. Taking the time to get it right.
KFG
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, the design phase of the ID project was done eons ago, literally, and before any implementation work was begun. It was never open. I think the requirements document must have been lost long ago though, because nobody knows wtf any of this stuff is. but EVERYONE knows that for a project this vast and complex, the only way to do it is to plan everything in advance from structures
Sad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Informative)
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 st
Re:Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I agree that Apple isn't giving back enough to open source, but they have no hesitation using and shipping GPL'ed stuff. Two important examples are gcc and bash. And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.
Apart from an implementation of the Objective C frontend and runtime. But don't let facts get in the way of your ill informed ranting.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Half right. The front-end came from NeXT. The runtime came from the GNU project. When you compile Objective-C with GCC you have the option of targeting the NeXT runtime, which is proprietary (and ships with OS X) or the GNU runtime, which is used by GNUstep and other non-NeXT Objective-C apps. Without a runtime, the front-end was completely useless.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Informative)
So (and somebody correct me if I'm wrong), if you're using gcc to compile c++ on linux, you're using Apple code.
Re:Sad (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.htm
NeXt didn't want to contribute their code back to the Free Software movement. They even had some sneaky attempts (shipping just the
Re:Sad (Score:3, Insightful)
Aren't you listening? NeXT had no trouble using gcc, no matter how "viral" you think the GPL may be. What they weren't doing is satisfying their requirements under the GPL, and once they were forced to, their contributions were nearly useless.
Sometimes I wonder, no matter what its intentions, if GPL is actually helping
Re:Sad (Score:3, Informative)
Eivind.
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Funny)
OK, now you're trolling...
Rich
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, if the BSD code had been GLPd, Apple wouldn't have used it as a starting point.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Even Fink is struggling (Score:2)
I don't like to complain, though. Fink is still a wonderful concept. I just wish its admins didn't already have so many things they need to dedicate their time to.
In the meantime, though I do my development work and some testing on my Powerbook, my stable test server is an Ubuntu box. It's just ea
Fink is not out of Date! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
pkgsrc (Score:3, Informative)
The pkgsrc project www.pkgsrc.org [pkgsrc.org] supports Mac OS X. The packages it contains are much more up to date than either Fink or DarwinPorts, and can also be used on a number of other Unix like operating systems. I bought a Mac at the beginning of the year, and intended to wipe the disk to install NetBSD. I ended up dual booting it because I found I liked Mac OS X so much, especially when I can use pkgsrc on it.
Re:pkgsrc (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, it does require a case sensitive filesystem. I have to admit being slightly bemused that Apple had gone down the same braindead route as Microsoft in this respect - having a case aware but case insensitive filesystem. NeXTstep used a "normal" case-sensitive Unix filesystem, so I can't understand why they switched bahaviour instead of adding the extra metadata and fork support to UFS.
Re:pkgsrc (Score:3, Insightful)
Why can't we have filesystems that are character-encoding sensitive? Foo.txt{ASCII} and Foo.txt{Unicode} are clearly different at the data representation level, so why can't filesystems recognize that simple, obvious fact?
Heck, while we're at it, let's add font-sensitivity: I want my Foo.txt{Arial} to be distinct from my Foo.txt{Helvetica}. Then we can throw in attribute-sensitivity, so Foo.txt{Unicode, Garamond, bold, oblique, second
Sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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]
.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, this
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:3, Informative)
An example of open-source compatible OS would be OpenVMS in my mind, which is, of course, closed-source, but very p
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:2, Insightful)
Frankly, if Apple had decided to bas OS X on the Linux kernel, I'd probably be a Mac user now. At the moment, many of their products don't appeal to me enough for me
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:4, Informative)
* The CLR part of
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:2, Informative)
Apart from the kernel itself, you mean?
On the Server version of OS X there will be many more.
I think that if you removed all open source software from OS X and rebooted, your machine would no
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:2)
Apple's current OS is relies on it's open source code base, but the world of open source software would be pretty much exactly the same without Apple.
You're mistaken, Apple does release tons of code (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm... You're mistaken [apple.com]. Some of Apple's open-sourced code:
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... (Score:2, Insightful)
The only people who use MacOS are those who want an alternative operating system and don't care about whether it is Free Software or no
Re:Sorry, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sorry, but... (Score:3, Informative)
OpenDarwin was starte
Sad but not unexpected (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they in violation of any software license? No? Then Apple has absolutely no obligation to give anything to anybody. If "the community" wants more than "precious little," they should put that in the license terms, eh?
That's like getting a plumber bill for $150, paying $150, then having the plumber come and complain that you didn't give him a massage, too.
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you aware that Konqueror is GPL? And that KHTML is LGPL?
Maybe Apple chose FreeBSD for other reasons than the BSD license? I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix us
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
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.
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh wuh? OpenDarwin was frozen out of the information and code required to remain relevant, but what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems? I don't see anyone talking about problems with linux here, after all linux is thriving and opendarwin is, well, deceased. Doesn't sound like a shortcoming to me.
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:4, Insightful)
GGP said:
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.
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:3, Interesting)
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
That's why I said that they "essentially". How many IE users know the code is based partially on Mosaic? Yet the "proper attrbution" is right there in the About box. MS took it, and now everyone considers it theirs. I haven't heard many blame the NCSA for winning the browser wars. That's essentially plagiarism. End of story.
>but these licenses are from nearly
Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programmer. (Score:2)
-uso.
Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme (Score:2)
Personally, I have no idea why people want to run any proprietary software on their Linux box, except maybe games and "shit you can't live without". Maybe no-one who uses a Mac ever migrates to Linux.
Neither C nor C++ for GUI work, thanks... (Score:3, Funny)
C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C
Re:Neither C nor C++ for GUI work, thanks... (Score:3, Funny)
"C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. "
I think that's backwards. Objective-C is C that was injected with radioactive serum which effected a deep change in original language's existence and modus operandi.
C++, on the other hand, is like Iron Man (or even the bulkier Iron Man armor-based War Machine armor with attached gatling gun and rocket launchers), a highly complex, difficult to maintain technology that has many different versions, yet which essentially
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme (Score:3, Insightful)
Qt, a toolkit written in a language that Trolltech finds so deficient that they extended it, a language that has such a baroque library that Trolltech wrote their own. As for Glib and GTK+, I have been through a fair bit of the code, and it is a work of art. I'm not saying that the Qt code isn't a work of art, but your criticism of Glib/GTK+ is bullshit.
DarwinPorts (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
Bruce
Don't fret. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't fret. (Score:3, Interesting)
DP's "it just works" capabilities means I get more work done.
One more aspect of evolution: (Score:3, Funny)
Not surprised. (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:So they're changing the name to (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
You know, when I see "Apple" I think a lot of things, most of them less than complementary. One word that never comes to my mind, though, is "macho."
Quite the opposite. I'm always half-expecting a flying finger-snap.
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:3, Insightful)
That there is still any hoop-jumping is a problem. And that there is now little hoop-jumping should not be cause for astonishment. I know the Linux user mindset - the kind of macho need to hack around in the terminal just to do something trivial like getting wireless working, converting WEP keys to hex with my bare hands - because I have been there myself, but now I just want to get on with my work (and my life) - Linux wast
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought so too, for good 5 years when I was supporting Linux without any doubts.
Then there came several harder weeks, when I just had to get my job done quickly and efficiently. And as different problems started popping up, I would spend 5-6 hours a time seeking a solution, fixing them, getting no actual work done. Sure I was learning a lot of new things, but things at hand were delayed.
Now typing this from WinXP. Because the Ubuntu I have install
Why blame Apple... (Score:2)
If Apple users smarten up, it in no way changes what Apple has done and continues to do: use open source when beneficial.
Re:Why blame Apple... (Score:2)
Linux (zealots) have been pissing me off (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Linux user of four years who has recently bought their first, personal, mac laptop I wish to call bullshit. I'd like to point out that OSX still plays a very important part in Linux development (less so in BSD) - specifically in regards to new features. Take for example xgl/compiz and xcompmgr which will be in full deployment for when Vista ships to compete with the M$ eye candy...Sure it only came into the lime light when Vistas beta'
Re:Linux (zealots) have been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
I've added a few things to the above. My additions are in brackets and bolded - they might help explain the disconnect you're seeing. To the end users you're talking to, Unix means "it doesn't lock up twice a day like %*$#@ MacOS 9 did". The rest is just boring technobabble th
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Don't let it get to you. These are the same sort of people who call a PC the "modem", the 3.5" floppy the "hard drive" and the monitor the "computer."
They don't care enough to know why they're wrong, so you shouldn't care enough to be annoyed by them.
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
The kernel is the lowest-level part of an operating system, which provides abstractions between programs that users see and the hardware. Some of the most important of these abstractions are virtualization of limited physical resources such as CPU and memory, so that programs don't have to worry about sharing them. Userspace programs that are generally considered part of the OS incl
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:2)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. Try looking at the bsd subdirectory of the xnu source tree; it's not "just BSD" - it implements processes/threads atop Mach tasks/threads, and has IOKit for drivers - but it's recognizably based on BSD kernel code."
It still uses BSD code for that.
Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, nice try. (Score:2)
Re:What a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
That wasn't the point at all. 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.
There's nothing illegal or really wrong here... just more of Apple's slimy marketing tactics.
But hey, who can argue with the company who came out with the first 64-bit computer?!
Re:What a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
(A) OpenDarwin wasn't run by Apple.
(B) Apple is sharing code both by distributing it directly and (occasionally) by having Mac OS engineers commit it directly into the FreeBSD tree. The latter means that people from Apple are doing all the adaption work to actually make the code directly usable by the upstream.
While I