Surely Apple's free to do what they want with their source code, unless it OSX is substantially based on code from elsewhere.

Last things first: Apple doesn't have to abide by the APSL with respect to their own code.

Second, if it's "OS X" on PPC, and "OS X" on Intel, why wouldn't it be "OS X" on ARM? It could well come from the very same code base, simply an unreleased branch.

I think you are a bit confused. The license holders, in this case Apple, have the right to license out their works to people in an agreement that defines what the licensees can do with Apple's product. The "Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement" you quote is just this, Apple's agreement with whoever wants to use it. Apple, being the owners of the Mac OS X, can do whatever they'd like with Mac OS X because they own the rights. We, on the other hand, are only licensing it.

So it's not running OSX. Who cares? Why does it have to be running some variant of a desktop OS anyway? There are plenty of embedded OSes to choose from...

Most programmers allready knew this, who in their right mind would actualy port OSX (darwin + the rest) to a tiny handheld?

Its only the apple whores who believe in steves hype machine.

1) Licenses are for people who don't own the code. Apple can make a new product using its own code (and BSD code) without releasing sources, even though a third party would be required to do so (I'm assuming your interpretation of the APSL is correct).

2) OS X is not Darwin. For most people, the identity of the system has nothing to do with the kernel or even the BSD-level userland programs. This applies not only to users, but also to developers working with high-level APIs (Cocoa, Carbon, any of the Core* technologies...). They could replace the kernel entirely, and it would make little difference.

First, if it was really OSX, why would they need Google's help to implement Google Maps? It would just run.
Second, the interface is obviously significantly different.
Third, it's hard to believe a handheld would have the resources to run OSX.
Finally, if it was really OSX, then any OSX app would run on it (in theory).

I suspect it's "OS X" like my PDA runs "Windows".

Darwin/OSX is based on the FreeBSD userland. The kernel is based on Mach. Regardless of whether either one requires an MMU or a nuclear reactor in order to run keep in mind that it's software. Which means that clever types and go in and make some changes and maybe take away a requirement or add a feature. Gosh kids these days.

beacuse NetBSD already runs on ARM perhaps? They have their own coders to do what ever they need inhouse anyway.

I think you are confusing OSX with Mac OSX. Mac OSX is the OS that Apple sell and put on their computers. At no point in the Keynote or after has anyone said that the iPhone runs Mac OSX. They have simply said that it runs OSX. To my mind this means that it is running a subset of Mac OSX. At the very least the iPhone OSX appears to be missing Carbon (no loss to me), the Finder and other "built in" apps and quite possibly Quicktime. Whilst Steve said it had Cocoa that normally just refferrs to the main Kits: Foundation and the App Kit. This does not include PDFKit, QTKit and so on.

Whether is's based off Darwin or not is hard to say. At a certain level that does not matter. What would matter if Apple decide to open up to third part developers is the APIs that are available. There may be a small subset that want POSIX on their phone but for actual application development Cocoa with some custom PhoneKit is probably all that is important.

No the parent is right. There is very little GPL or otherwise copyleft code shipped with OS X, and what is there is all userland stuff that really doesn't need to be on a phone. The vast majority of the stuff that Apple/NeXT didn't write is licensed under BSD-like terms, and therefore allows them to do whatever they want with it.

Even if there isn't an ARM version of the kernel, and who's to say there isn't. Apple do not have to follow their own licence. That doesn't preclude the rest of the operating system being standard OS-X libraries compiled for ARM. The video iPod is also ARM and some time ago Apple were advertising for a quicktime expert with ARM experience which suggests that at least quicktime has been ported to ARM. If you can have Linux on an AMD-64 and an ARM 7 why not OS-X?

The majority of OS X (including the kernel) is based on BSD, GNU and other Open Source code that never originated within Apple.

BSD does not require that modified source code be released. AFAIK, there is no GNU software in the mainline distribution of OS X. The only significant piece of GNU software that I'm aware of is the optional GCC compiler. Since Apple is unlikely to ship GCC on their iPhone, they're almost certainly free and clear.

Exactly. Apple has shown in the past that they are capable of recompiling their OS for different architectures -- they did it from PPC and x86 -- why wouldn't they just have recompiled a stripped-down kernel for ARM? After all, they have all the source code, so if anyone could do it, it would be them.

This article just doesn't make any sense. I don't know if the Slashdot editors were looking for an anti-Apple article so as to appear to be giving "equal time," but this is pretty idiotic. There are better criticisms of Apple in general, and of the iPhone in particular, than this.

Any chance we could, like, wait for the iPhone to be, you know, actually released before we make definitive statements on what OS it is or isn't running? Right now, the only people who have any idea what OS is really running on the iPhone are the people who worked on it; I'm taking a wild guess here that you're not one of them.

Sure, I understand it's going to be a long six months with nothing but speculation to keep us warm at night. But let's keep in mind that, until we get our hands on the iPhone, it's speculation only, not knowledge.

Quite alot of the code in OX X is actually not from Apple, but from FreeBSD, so the problem is not Apple's ownership of the code. The main problem is that the BSD license doesn't protect the right's of Apple's customer's at all, so Apple are free to take off with the code and contribute nothing in return. This is not nearly the first time this has come up (SunOS, BSDi, BSD386, IPSO, JunOS, NextStep etc. were also forked from BSD). It seems pretty clear to me that the BSD licenses encouragement of this kind of "selfish" forking with nothing coming back to the original OS is the only possible explanation why, even with far less experts, much weaker (at least technicall) leadership and far fewer resources the Linux Kernal has managed to get ahead of BSD.

is the question this begs (in my mind at least). is it the UI? or is it the architecture? the kernel?

another post mentioned that if it's os x on intell and ppc, then why not arm?

the summary implies that for it to be os x in a "meaningful" sense, it must be the same kernel (darwin). what if it was a complete different kernel with the same core services on top of it. in other words, isn't it the API that defines an os? if my app can get access to the hardware through the same API calls, and i don't have to worry about said hardware, isn't that the same os? java comes to mind, but it abstracts the os (thus the hardware). . .

i understand the gist of the summary, and there may be a CS defined standard of "what makes an os an os" that i'm unaware of, but it seems it would have to be API-based or architecture/paradigm based, or both.

hopefully other /.'ers can shed some light on this for me!

cheers,
mr c

That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like).

How does it mean it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense? I'd say having Cocoa/AppKit (and therefore an Objective-C runtime), Core Animation, and other OS X technologies constitutes being OS X.

So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way)

Again, what is with this "meaningful" crap? Objective-C, Cocoa, AppKit, and the like are OS X. OS X is the NextStep-derived stuff running on top of Darwin. It can most certainly be OS X without Darwin. In fact, it might be Apple's first steps toward moving off of Mach sometime in the future.

Just because it's not running Darwin does not mean that it's not based off of some of the similar if not directly linked technologies that OS X is built off of. Apple could've created their own proprietary "Darwin" for iPhone if they wanted, much how Linux was a clone of proprietary "Unix". Seeing as it's built for a small and limited device, you wouldn't have to clone all of the OS.

When Jobs refers to OS X, I assume he is talking about the system that they built on top of Darwin. To me, Darwin will be just that; Darwin. It's a BSD. There have been many interviews where Jobs has said that OS X was built on top of Darwin or Unix, so the only logical avenue of thought is that he's not stating that Darwin and the OS X are one in the same (since you CAN run a system off of Darwin alone without OS X), yet recognizes that they hold a symbiotic relationship in Apple's application of merging the two together.

The following is taken verbatim from the NY Times interview article

"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."

So he's saying that Apple and possibly others might write software for the iPhone. From what Jobs said
you can see that the emphasis will be on control to ensure that all Apps are very robust so that the phone
works reliably.

Second, if it's "OS X" on PPC, and "OS X" on Intel, why wouldn't it be "OS X" on ARM?

Because that wouldn't jive with the competitor-funded Apple-haters desperately trying to tear down the iPhone in the last few days.

Wow, there's nothing in your post that proves it's not OS X. A new interface and the fact Apple isn't letting third-parties run on it magically means it's not OS X? Just because you believe it doesn't have the resources to run an embedded version of OS X? And when did Steve Jobs ever say they needed Google's "help" to implement the maps feature? They simply worked with them, which is a market-speak way of saying they partnered up in the search features of the iPhone.

It's OS X. Deal with it, people.

A lot of people are claiming to know what an iPhone really is like inspite of not having seen one or even known of their existence before a couple of days ago.

It may be a striped version of OSX but it obviously is a version of OSX since it has some very OSX features like Core Animation which doesn't even show until Leopard. Even things like Widgets are OSX. They've been working on the phone for years so I'd assume they adapted the OS to the chip they are using. Using even a notebook processor would be silly. The power requirements would limit you to one five minute phone call per charge.

What really seems to be pissing everyone off is it's a computer under the hood and Apple isn't open sourcing it. Apple has always been big on protecting their hardware and I'm guessing that's why they aren't providing the code. It's meant to be a phone at this stage and they don't want to deal with all the hassles of people screwing up their phones trying to get Pong to run on it. Also that has to be the crown jewel for virus writers so why help them? I'm sure they'll open it up to development eventually but it's likely to be years and only when it starts crossing the line into becoming a full on portable computer. It's a staggering smart phone, deal with it.

Have you guys *READ* the BSD license? It has never forced source code to be published. In fact this is the fundamental issue between the BSD license and GPL camps. I am shocked and dismayed to see how many uneducated comments have been made in this thread about the BSD license requiring source code to be published.

Regarding the question of "Can it really be OSX running on the iPhone?", it seems pretty obvious to me. If the iPhone is indeed an ARM chip, then I would *assume* Apple has ported Darwin to this chip. Look at NetBSD for a second. It supports a ton of different ARM chips and platforms. It even supports a *26bit* ARM cpu. (NetBSD/acorn26)

Apple could very easily port Darwin to ARM. Let's assume they have. I still think of my MacBook Pro as running "Mac OSX" even when I have booted it *single user* to the point where I am running Darwin + init + shell and nothing else.

It is a bit of a stretch for Apple to call Darwin "OSX" if they only ported the kernel, but I would believe they have ported significant portions of the higher level OS functionality. E.g. graphics libraries, window server, etc. This is more than enough to call it OSX, even if it is not 100% source compatible with OSX on my Intel machine.

After all my latest and greatest MacOSX 10.4.8 application source code wouldn't work on 10.0 PPC, but 10.0 PPC is *still* OSX no matter what you might think.

Even if they used a Linux kernel, then piled there own locked down apps on top,
what difference would that make? It is still a closed development model of a black box system.

They are trying to sell a very high end phone that is completely closed to add-on apps.
That worked for the mp3 player, but the functionality of an mp3 player is expected to be limited.

Apple has chosen to live and die with a closed box model.

Is there anything in that post which is correct? So what is OS X doens't have a known ARM port, the BSDs run on ARM so porting it would be trivial. Also, Apple own the source so can do anything, including making a private branch. The iPhone could be using a low power PPC chip.

I've been waiting for clue to finally disappear from /., and it appears that 2007 is the year it happens.

the first release of NEXSTEP ran on 68030 workstations with just 8MB total RAM, I don't see the problem in running OSX on ARM pda with >32 MB system RAM.

Windows 3.1 ran in 4MB back then, so I guess I can run Vista in 16MB.

This should at least be marked as an editorial, and an extraordinarily poorly written one at that. Something so inflamatory and infantile shouldn't have made it to the front page in the first place.

an embedded OSX isn't really OSX. Just as embedded Linux isn't really linux and Windows CE isn't really Windows. It's mostly a matter of branding.

Because that wouldn't jive with the competitor-funded Apple-haters desperately trying to tear down the iPhone in the last few days

I think you meant to say 'jibe', which pretty much has the opposite meaning. Or at least it used to. The more people use the wrong word, the less meaning either one has.

1. Here are the iPhone components according to FRB Research via arstechnica [arstechnica.com]:

- Samsung Electronics for the CPU/Video processing
- Marvell for the 802.11 chipset
- Infineon Technologies for baseband communications
- Broadcomm Corp. for the touch screen controllers
- Cambridge Silicon Radio for the Bluetooth chipset

2. Darwin is an open source core based on FreeBSD according to Apple, Inc. [apple.com].

3. Here is freebsd on ARM processors (intel-based). ARM FreeBSD [freebsd.org].

4. Why is it tough to believe that Apple would simply recompile necessary components of Darwin on the ARM processors and then include and compile the necessary (and only the necessary!) mid level libraries? Many existing apps would work with only minor modifications (to take into account the new control scheme) and a recompile.

I suppose this depends on what you consider "embedded" and what you consider "real". I do development on an Intel xscale processor which is basically an arm9 on crack. It runs 2.6 kernel linux that is sucked right of kernel.org. Admittedly there are some patches that are added, but they mostly deal with hardware. This device is "embedded" to the degree that an iPhone is. It runs the linux kernel, I have a console with bash, it was built with gcc, runs gcc. Sounds like "real" linux to me!

I'm not sure why you bothered to reply to this article; it's so utterly wrong in so many ways. First of all, Apple holds the copyright to Darwin and can use it however they want. Just because they license it to YOU under a license that requires YOU to share code you modify, Apple is not bound by that license. Secondly, it would be silly for Apple NOT to leverage some of the Mac OS, but it would be just as silly for them to port the entire desktop OS. I think of this as about the same as saying the XBox OS is Windows 2000. It shares many APIs, it's branched from the same codebase, but it's targeted and maintained for a completely different goal.

I don't see why it's difficult for readers to perceive that parts of OSX could sit under 1/2 GB

The SDK module for 10.4u that ships with XCode clocks in at 317.2MB. And that's the entire public API suite.

The Public Frameworks for 10.4u Are just over 52MB
The unix standard /usr/ (include, lib, libexec, and X11R6) is a meaty 245.1 MB

Tiger's Extension folder is 129.9 MB, but that's assuming al the potential hardware (which could be greatly reduced)
Even the entirety of Core Services is only 163.5 MB.

So, the entire API set (with header), all the extension, and all of Core Services rounds out at 610.6 MB
That's without removing everything unnecessary for the phone (much of Core Services, Extensions, and all the header files.)

1/2 gig or smaller? Easily for a streamlined version of OSX that runs in a minimal footprint.

What part of "Mac OS X is highly portable" is so hard for people to understand? From it's original NeXT roots m68k, x86, sparc, pa-risc, and powerpc were shipping platforms at one time or another. Yes, it takes work to port to another platform (which might be ARM this time), but every time they port it they get better at it. The MacWorld 2007 keynote presentation of the iPhone sure looked like Mac OS X to me. Would you rather believe they wrote an entire embedded operating system *from scratch*? It's clear that the bogon flux has increased.

"1. OSX is a derivative of NeXTstep, originally written for the Motorola 68000 line of processors."

That's a good point. It ran on 68030 and 68040 CPUs, which weren't exactly high-powered. Also, I ran NextStep with a 400 *mega*byte hard drive, and still had about 200MB of it for my stuff after the whole system was installed -- and that included all the development tools! It ran well with 64MB of RAM, but could run with as little as 20MB. Mind you, they've added a huge amount of stuff to OS X, but its footprint could be stripped down easily by cleaning out most of what is in /Applications, taking out unnecessary (for most people) services for a phone (e.g., web server, print server, file server), stripping the binaries, leaving out development tools (development would be done on a desktop/laptop) and being selective about libraries and command-line binaries.

Well, there's mroe than that, though. The iPhone has no number pad, so how would existing applications be controlled? They would have to be rewritten to handle the iPhone's multi-touch. I was thinking that the fact that the iPhone ran a mobile version of OS X would mean that things like Widgets (if not full-on applications) could carry over between a Mac and an iPhone.

All good points - at the end of the day, it's just trademarks. There may be some parts in common, there may not, but the choice of name is decided by what brand name a company thinks is best, not what the technology is (it's not like there's going to be much if anything left over from "classic" Mac OS, as opposed to Mac OS X).

I remember when various new versions of AmigaOS were being proposed over the last decade - strangely in those situations, everyone on Slashdot was screaming about how "It's not an Amiga" - even in the cases where it certainly was a next version of the same OS, just because it had dropped some older things or wouldn't run on an Amiga 500. Yet on the Apple articles, it's accepted that all sorts of different systems are all "Macs" (and anyone even suggesting otherwise gets modded down, as you did...)

If Apple bought the trademark, they could just as easily say the iPhone ran BeOS - indeed, if history had gone different, BeOS would have been called "Mac OS X"...