I don't know what the submitter has been smoking, but this did /NOT/ happen a few days ago.

I remember downloading it a couple weeks ago. It's been available for download since they released their X11 betas.

All they put in the source tarball is the default twm. Thanks Apple.

He didn't say to "pretend copyright laws don't exist"

He said that having access to code is good for programmers. just like having access to books is good for people who want to be authors.

He actually said:

It doesn't really matter to real programmers if it's gpl or fbsd or anything.

If it doesn't matter then why do so many "real programmers" spend so much time arguing about it? Or perhaps they aren't "real programmers"?

He also said...

Having the source and getting ideas from it is a good thing.

Only if the license is appropriate. Try getting some "ideas" from Microsoft Shared Source and see how many lawsuits you get hit with. Or perhaps tell Phoenix that they didn't need to clean-room reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS back in 1985, because they could have just read the published and easily accessible assembly source.

The licensing ALWAYS matters. To pretend that it doesn't is simply naive. You can't simply "look at" source code just because you find it floating around the Internet; if you stupidly do so then anything you write afterwards is possibly tainted.

On Apple's X11 list [apple.com], it has been stated that X11.app's QuartzWM is going to remain closed-source and proprietary. That's all their code and they're going to keep it to themselves, as is their right. On the other hand, the extensions made to the xfree86 codebase have been offered back to the community under the same licensing terms as the rest of that project.

The source code would be nice, but at least they offer fully compiled binaries of MacOS 7.5.3 and older for free to anybody who wants to download it.

(Actually, IIRC, they have bumped their free "abandonware" OS list to everything up to 8.1 now, but I could be mistaken about that.)

Oh, by the way.... Once you've downloaded the compiled older version of MacOS, you can view and edit all of the system resources with ResEdit, and other free tools are out there for further hacking the MacOS.

So, unless you are planning on writing a derived OS and calling it Linmac or something, there's really not a whole lot of reason why anybody would want the source of System 7.

IIRC, each editor is assigned an 'early day'. Apparently they get up early (as early as 6 AM, oh the horror!) to go through the queue and make sure our European Slashdotters have something to look at.

Frankly, that would be the perfect job for me. It's 6:15 AM on a Sunday and I'm wide awake.

It would be simple to figure out what day is Pudge's day and act accordingly.

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Just in case anyone wants to accuse me of being OffTopic: here's a X11-related hint. Use fink to install The GIMP in the usual location and make the following AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
launch application "X11"
end tell

set results to do shell script "cd ~; DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY; PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH ; /sw/bin/gimp > /dev/null 2>&1 &"

That makes an AppleScript that opens X11 and the GIMP. Find an appropriate JPG of "Wilbur" the GIMP mascot, paste it into the "get info" icon box, and PRESTO! The GIMP in your dock!

Yes, Quartz is analogus to an X server, but quartz-wm is a window manager Apple developed along with their X Server implementation that gives Aqua style window appearances to window borders. And it doesn't look like crap.

It also seems to have better focus behavior than Orobor OSX [sourceforge.net] a non-Apple attempt at making a window manager that works well within Aqua.

And the beauty of Apple is, you can turn the pictures off if you don't like them.

Customisation for the end user is key.

I stopped using the floppy drive years before Apple dumped them, aside from reinstalling old games. I also haven't owned a burner since '99, and don't really have a use for one. I just have zero need of removable media, and nowadays I have DSL and a 100MB iDisk, so I can send some pretty big files to anyone in the world, and even let others upload to it. I've a 5GB iPod, too, so there's no reason to burn music CD's.

I can't even recall the last time I booted off a CD. If the worst happens to my OS X partition, my OS 9 partition starts up instead, and I can do repairs from there. This happened to me once last year.

this is the source code not the binaries you downloaded. Apple released the X11 beta program before they released the source code.

That's not a clarification. It's mostly wrong.

The GPL does not seek to protect the right for businesses to extend software without releasing the source to their extensions.

There are situations where the GPL does not apply, however. If Apple didn't distribute their binaries, they wouldn't have to distribute their source either.

All of this isn't really relevant, since XFree86 is under the X11 license, not the GPL.

At The Apple Store [apple.com] when you buy an XServe (which comes with an unlimited user lincense for OS X) you can buy a $999 "Mac OS X Server Maintenance Program" which sounds like it would of solved your problem to some degree...

"Mac OS X Server Maintenance is a 3 Year, non-cancelable agreement during which you will receive every major upgrade release to Mac OS X Server."

And a few geek hobbyists will be able to do what Apple failed to do after ten years of pumping millions of dollars into Copland? You'll recall that they tried to "bolt on a little pre-emptive MT, protected memory, and a real VM" and ended up scrapping the project and buying NeXT.

Answers to parent post:

1. Apple uses a semi-proprietary desktop environment known as Quartz for most GUI apps. X11 is a compatibility environment that partially maps X11 calls to Quartz calls, as well as doing some stuff of its own.
2. Yes, X11 apps now coexist with Cocoa (native OS X) applications on a single desktop. (However, there are still some focusing oddities. Oh well.)
3. These are Apple extensions to X11, but they will unfortunately not benefit Linux users -- it's all bolted to Quartz, and that's where all the acceleration is taking place anyway. The XFree86 acceleration is just as good, if not perhaps better. What's so cool about this is the integration with the standard OS X interface.

(Disclaimer: I've been using X11.app for a almost a month now. X11 for OS X (OS X11?) isn't new, and neither is this source. But that's what you get here... :)