Apple Releases macOS 10.12 Sierra Open Source Darwin Code (9to5mac.com) 134
An anonymous reader writes:Apple has released the open source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra. The code, located on Apple's open source website, can be accessed via direct link now, although it doesn't yet appear on the site's home page. The release builds on a long-standing library of open source code that dates all the way back to OS X 10.0. There, you'll also find the Open Source Reference Library, developer tools, along with iOS and OS X Server resources. The lowest layers of macOS, including the kernel, BSD portions, and drivers are based mainly on open source technologies, collectively called Darwin. As such, Apple provides download links to the latest versions of these technologies for the open source community to learn and to use.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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BSD might be work somewhat acceptably if you're willing to accept certain hassles. As far as I know no one has gotten the built-in wifi on newer Macs or the new Touch Bar on 2016 MacBook Pro to work properly. Good luck getting Apple to release drivers for those.
But if you own a shiny Apple device and have a desperate need to run Linux you can probably afford to buy an equivalently specced PC laptop that costs 1/2 as much and has better compatibility and run Linux/BSD on that. Either that or use Parallels/Fu
OS X... great, if you like BORKEN SHIT (Score:1, Interesting)
Apple's still sitting on serious bugs. Examples: One that's been around for many revisions of the OS is the abjectly borken UDP implementation; Apple's version of a supposedly broadcast protocol... that can only have one listener... brilliant. Linux and windows handle this just fine, too. One new in 10.12 is they borked Qt's tooltips and menus, which have worked since 10.6.8 through 10.11... and are now blank. There are plenty more. Those are just recently (and still) irritating here, so they're on my mind.
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One new in 10.12 is they borked Qt's tooltips and menus, which have worked since 10.6.8 through 10.11
Dunno. Tooltips work fine for me.
But, then, I don't use Qt. And one reason I don't is that something like this will happen.
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One new in 10.12 is they borked Qt's tooltips and menus, which have worked since 10.6.8 through 10.11
You have always been able to spot Qt apps on OS X: they're the ones that look ugly and where even basic things such as text fields don't respect the HIGs (for years, they managed to have different keyboard shortcuts for skipping words / lines in a text field to every other OS X app), so you'll forgive me if I suspect that this is more likely to be Qt's fault.
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Personally I never worry about borken shit. The only stuff that bothers me is broken shit!
Re: OS X... great, if you like BORKEN SHIT (Score:1)
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One that's been around for many revisions of the OS is the abjectly borken UDP implementation; Apple's version of a supposedly broadcast protocol... that can only have one listener...
Apple doesn't have their own network stack. Their network stack is the BSD stack [wikipedia.org], and has been for every version of OS X.
Apple still absorbs code from FreeBSD, and contributes code back to FreeBSD.
One new in 10.12 is they borked Qt's tooltips and menus
So a broken 3rd party open source library is Apple's problem?
There was an ex
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How easy is it to fix something yourself? (Score:2, Interesting)
Open source is fine and dandy, but the real killer feature is being able to easily fix a bug in the OS yourself, deploy and test to yourself, and share with others.
How easy is it to do that with Apple's OS these days?
Re:How easy is it to fix something yourself? (Score:5, Insightful)
The other side of this is that Linux developers can use it to gain insight to making your favorite Linux distribution run – or run better – on Mac hardware.
Whether you love or hate Mac hardware, there are a lot of people who want to run Linux on it.
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The other side of this is that Linux developers can use it to gain insight to making your favorite Linux distribution run – or run better – on Mac hardware.
...assuming that the code to support the Mac hardware in question is in the kernel, or an open-source kernel extension ("loadable kernel module" in Linux-speak), rather than in a non-open-source kernel extension.
Re: a lot of people who want to run Linux on a Mac (Score:2)
Linus was using a Mac for Linux at one point. I don't know if he still is?
If you have the money, why not buy the hardware you like and run the your preferred OS on it?
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Re: a lot of people who want to run Linux on a Ma (Score:2)
Re: a lot of people who want to run Linux on a Ma (Score:2)
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Say what? There is nothing wrong with a Unix desktop. Hell, I ran Solaris 10 with GNOME 2 on my laptop for a while and never had any issues with it - and that was when there was much less of everything on the web. We've come to the point that the actual desktop doesn't make as much difference as it used to, but some how they are getting worse with time. I can't stand macOS (vs say 10.4-10.6), Windows 8-10 (vs Windows 2000-7), or KDE 4-5 (vs 3 and older). Things just get more bloated, more complex, less
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I've done it - I have a Mac Mini which i just found to be unreliable as shit . I purchased it to try out some of the Mac Music / Audio software. After finding it a pain in the ass to use and half of my hardware being incompatible (PC keyboard, Midi Interface , External USB Audio ) I gave up and started using it as a Plex Media server. It ran ok for a while but after a few incremental updates it just became unstable.
So I was - fuck this for a laugh - wiped it and installed Linux and Kodi - and now its useful
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Open source is fine and dandy, but the real killer feature is being able to easily fix a bug in the OS yourself, deploy and test to yourself, and share with others.
That's the killer feature of "Free Software" (or at least that's the idea), this is Open Source. Though of course it's a bit of a moving target for Free Software what with things like Tivoization (addressed with GPLv3) and "cloud computing" (Affero GPL) so what is and isn't "Free Software" can be a bit confusing in itself.
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Well if it's in a bit that Apple open sourced, it's as easy as you would expect, although, obviously, building and installing kernels is not a game for beginners.
Getting Apple to accept your patches might be a whole other story.
Re: How easy is it to fix something yourself? (Score:1)
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Just like the jokes about Apple's 1-button mice, that's a rather outdated view of Linux. Users haven't had to tinker with their systems to 'just use' Linux since what, 10 years ago?
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There are already some projects based on Darwin, and you can build your own GNU/Darwin (or whatever userland you prefer/Darwin) distro if you have the patience.
However, you need to set you expectations right. What Apple is giving you is basically the equivalent of a Kernel + some core system utilities and drivers. This does not include the graphical stack (the equivalent of Xorg or Wayland). It should be possible to run Xorg on a GNU/Darwin system, but don't expect any Mac applications to run at all. You'd
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There are already some projects based on Darwin, and you can build your own GNU/Darwin (or whatever userland you prefer/Darwin) distro if you have the patience.
However, you need to set you expectations right. What Apple is giving you is basically the equivalent of a Kernel + some core system utilities and drivers. This does not include the graphical stack (the equivalent of Xorg or Wayland). It should be possible to run Xorg on a GNU/Darwin system, but don't expect any Mac applications to run at all. You'd have to re-implement the Mac graphical API (cocoa, I believe it is called).
Still, it is interesting that Apple released this.
BSD released a compat layer for linux programs years ago. To compile a great deal of the essential opensource software that runs on linux distros you need this layer on the BSD. I can't see why this cannot be done for the Darwin kernel seeing that there are a more limited number of hardware drivers something which makes coding for Macs a more sensible platform in some ways. Essentially forgetting about involving the proprietary guis of the Mac windowing environment and using cloned opensource ones.
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If you want to make an open source version of Darwin then it involves some very extensive reverse engineering. A number of tarballs for the kernel extensions that they still provide are completely outdated and many things have changed since then. The curren
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Understand that the MacBook OS is a BSD kernel
Well, Mach+BSD, but both are open source.
the GNU OS (tool chain)
Some of userland is GNU (and some of it may be GNU in various of the *BSDs). Other parts of userland are also from BSD, or written by Apple, or code from various other places. The toolchain, if by that you mean "the compilers, the assembler, and the linker", aren't GNU any more or were never GNU. The assembler and links are from Apple (some possibly ultimately from NeXT); the compilers used to be from GNU, but they're now from the LLVM project.
Re:OSX is BSD Unix with Some Extras (Score:5, Informative)
Look kids. Get over the small minded philosophical hangups. Understand that the MacBook OS is a BSD kernel + the GNU OS (tool chain) + Plus the NSstuff that Next brought. That's it. The vast majority of code is already open, because it has been developed by the community over 30 years.
the XNU kernel is an evolved version of the XNU kernel from NextSTEP that uses some BSD components, CMU Mach microkernel components and C++ I/O Kit which replaced NextSTEP's ObjC DriverKit. It's not a "BSD kernel" per say. the toolchain is definitely not GNU at all. LibSystem uses no GNU code at all. It uses the BSD standard library libc, not glibc. clang is the compiler, not gcc as that's something they got rid of many years ago. They do still use some software preinstalled that are under GPL but it's no "toolchain". See Apple’s great GPL purge [ath0.com].
A number of important components are completely closed which are needed to boot XNU on its own, like PlatformExpert [puredarwin.org]. So you're not exactly correct in your statement here.
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I think it's just stupid that POSIX programs don't always work the way you expect or are missing (e.g. umount -> diskutil unmount )
umount's still there, and it works the same way it does on other UN*Xes - i.e., if some program has a handle (file descriptor, mapped file, etc.) on the volume to be unmounted, it fails (unless you use the -f flag, to forcibly invalidate those handles and unmount the file system). "diskutil unmount" sends a "hey, could you please let go of any handles you have for this?" request before the actual unmount() call is done, and waits a while for "OK, I've released it" replies before it attempts to unmount.
Unf
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Mac OS X's libc is so far behind what's in NetBSD or FreeBSD it's almost laughable. There are a so many missing function calls–– I write software that's portable to Linux, NetBSD, and FreeBSD; it won't build on MacOS without major extra effort to close the gaps.
What were you missing? There's been some slow movement inside Apple to start treating FreeBSD libc as an upstream vendor platform, to push their changes upstream, and do a new import. I'd be interested in what they're lacking, as it would probably help push this along a bit.
Where Do I Download The ISO? (Score:1, Informative)
I remember about 15 years ago when I downloaded the darwin ISO and installed it on a machine. It was a basic unix-like system, similar to installing a NetBSD base install. Probably pkgsrc would be portable to it, so it could be a complete freenix solution to install and just use.
But my understanding is that Apple quit supporting or even allowing an installable Darwin ISO. So this is just bits and pieces out of their code repository that you can look at but not do much with unless you buy their stuff.
I'm
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That somewhere is the issue; there aren't many images in distribution and the ones with original media hoard them rather than rip and share them.
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Retrocomputing, nothing else.
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AFAIK NextStep and OpenStep is pretty much freeware now. I mean permitted to download from somewhere and use.
Not really relevant in a discussion where we're talking about source access, is that? The hardware support is nonexistent so there is literally no point to that.
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Apple doesn't care if somebody makes a Darwin ISO. There's nothing they can do to prevent it anyway.
The bottom line is nobody wants to go to the significant amount of time and energy required to produce a Darwin ISO.
A huge part of the problem is supporting non-Apple hardware (drivers), and you need a significant amount of skill to do it, even if you are re-using code from FreeBSD. They can't use any of the drivers from Linux for the same reason FreeBSD can't use Linux drivers.
Back when there was a community
Does it compile? (Score:2)
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That makes two retarded shit-filled idiots. Apple does not have to release the vast majority of the code that they have. Very little, if any, is released under the GPL.
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Actually, most of those things should be true. Charities wouldn't be necessary if government properly taxed the wealthy and provided a universal basic income. Voting should be mandatory. I can't think of a single valid reason why organ donation shouldn't be mandatory, you're dead, you're not using it any more, you and your family members should have no say whatsoever. And vaccinations should absolutely be mandatory unless they're medically contraindicated.
And it should be illegal to sell software withou
Re:Communism (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an interesting argument. On the one hand, getting something for free can lead to laziness and complacency. Yet, somehow we let children go for nearly 18 years sometimes without earning a paycheck. Oh, sure -- some get an allowance for chores or get a paper route -- some even flip burgers in their teens, but really it's not enough to live on. It's as if we let their wealthier parents take care of all their basic needs, but they can go out and earn discretionary income if they're motivated enough! Why, it's pure Leninist Communism on the family-scale!
Or, you know. Maybe in a world where human physical labor is obsolete and even many white collar jobs are now obsolete, maybe we should prepare for a world where just about every job is obsolete, and the rich, wealthy owners of the land and corporations can afford to use the immense wealth built on robot labor and Artificial Intelligence to let everyone have their basic needs tended to with a tiny bit of discretionary money to buy their products so that the whole system doesn't collapse under its own weight. Because if you have an AI/robot workforce and so does every other company on the planet, no one has a real paycheck to buy products, so the economy collapses and your AI/robot infrastructure crumbles b/c it's useless to make things for people that can't afford your products.
Hyperbole? Nope. China is replacing their human workforce with robots. Read that again and let it sink in a bit. China, where workers are paid less per year than many Americans make in a week has decided to replace thousands upon thousands of human beings with robots... b/c it's cheaper. Self-driving cars are going to be a thing in the next 5 to 10 years -- so much for those 2 Million American trucking jobs plus another few million taxi drivers... and Uber/Lyft. I've seen whole departments shelled out to the core to be replaced with automated systems. The other day, I saw a robot tattoo artist! Seriously, it scans your body, preps the needle, and will do a complete sitting for a tattoo given the design. There is no job that's safe. Legal Clerks are being replaced with automation. Nurses, pharmacists. Even surgeons. The more creative and nuanced the job, the longer the hold-out... but it's coming. The information age made globalization possible, but the AI age will make global massive joblessness a reality -- Who would hire a human being if an AI and/or robot could do the job cheaper, faster, for longer, and more reliably?!?!? Most kiosks cost around $30K -- and McDonald's is rolling those out nation-wide to replace people that used to take your order (or at least prevent them from having to hire more than a couple people capable of taking your order per site) Many auto-manufacturing robots are cheaper than union labor. In the USA, we have union workers sitting in seats on robot arms and the arm moves the worker to the place for them to screw the bolt in. In foreign plants... that human is replaced by a robot hand that does the job better. How long before the unions break down and let the USA plants do the same?
Hogwash. (Score:2)
This time has come, and passed.
Do you think computer programming is a "real job"?
It didn't exist until new technology allowed it less than 100 years ago. It's in high demand. It earns a high wage if done right, and a survivable wage if done barely adequately.
Nevertheless, I bet there were plenty of people alive a century ago and more who would call it pure leisure. It's not physical labor. It doesn't require you to breathe poison gas, or wrestle with criminals. You don't have to deal with inclement wea
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You're right that its unsustainable, but every business that automates will only be thinking about their own bottom line and not about society as a whole. If they don't automate, they will be uncompetitive against others that do.
Consumers would need to vote with their feet and opt for the more expensive non automated suppliers in order to discourage the trend, but people wont because again they only think about their own bottom line.
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Lenin openly advocated terrorism. He advocated the execution of economic speculators, etc. I don't understand what people in the modern era mean when they call things like a 'universal basic income' Leninist. Typically, they are people who have never, ever, read anything written by Lenin.
Re:Communism (Score:4, Funny)
FTFY
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Lenin advocated for revolution, which is the problem. Communism, as loaded as that word is, boils down to an economic model that may or may not work. Mostly, it doesn't, because there are too many opportunities to cheat, and too few incentives to play ball. But communes exist, here and there, among like-minded individuals who take it upon themselves not to fuck each other over. But on a broad scale? I wouldn't bank on it.
But none of that matters. Because large-scale communism has never existed. Not b
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Charities wouldn't be necessary if government properly taxed the wealthy and provided a universal basic income.
Yes, because the only purpose of a charity is to give money and food away. /sarcasm
Yeah, exactly, they are there to funnel other people's money to politicians who can help you.
Re: huh (Score:2)
Compulsory voting just means Mickey Mouse gets a higher percentage of the result, and creates make-work bureaucracy for fining / jailing non compliant citizens.
Ask Australia how well compulsory voting works.
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Best if you dont. It sounds like you might not like the answer: very well.
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I can't think of a single valid reason why organ donation shouldn't be mandatory, you're dead, you're not using it any more, you and your family members should have no say whatsoever.
It's called Organlegging. China executes thousands of people every year, packs them off in death vans, and their family never gets to see the body again. The total number of people murdered by the state is a state secret. Do you really want to encourage nations to kill people for parts? Because that's what you're asking for.
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Unless you're one of the under-taxed wealthy OP was referring to, he wasn't talking about you.
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Re:huh (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood why people consider this "the freedom to take away freedom" (or the related problems often termed "tolerance of intolerance") argument to be compelling. "Boo hoo, this society is so repressive! I'm not allowed to punch random people in the face!" It's entirely reasonable to insist that people who want to use open sourced software for their own ends not change the license. There are multiple real-life examples showing us of how this can go badly for permissive and multiple real-life examples of how GPL enforcement can lead to very worthy projects [slashdot.org] appearing.
Major corporate-sponsored permissive-licensed OSS didn't even take off until years after the GPL had established itself, as a reaction to the GPL. Google doesn't Apache license Android userland stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or because they think permissive freedom is "real" freedom. They did it and do it because the GPL was already well established in the Linux ecosystem and they really didn't want to see any competing GPL projects emerge.
The anti-GPL / pro-permissive position is, for the most part, completely disconnected with reality.
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There is no choice, that has been taken away.
No, a choice has been given where no choice existed before. Go try to modify and redistribute non-Darwin bits of OS X (assuming you can find the source) if you don't believe me. Copyright law being what it is, the default is zero freedom. If the GPL FORCES people to do stuff (or if it's "viral", though you haven't mentioned that word yet), how would you characterize proprietary code? Surely, the verbs and adjectives there must be much more dire.
Apple has for example been dumping GPL for BSD (etc) licensed software
Because it gives them an easy kill switch, or other flexible
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1. I don't particularly want to debate this point into the ground (done so recently) if you're an Apple enthusiast, but for the iOS at least it is worth noting Android and WebOS and Maemo/Meego and Angstrom family distros and even OpenMoko were all the verge of bringing touchscreen awesomeness to phones, and Apple was forced to copy some of their best features moreso than the other way around.
While Apple has copied features from other sources, as have those other sources copied from others, that sentence is so wrong, it's almost as if you live backwards in time.
First iPhone: June 2007
First Android phone: October 2008
First WebOS phone: June 2009
First Meego phone: October 2011
It's also worth noting that, prior to the iPhone release, Android's UI was a BB clone. Google had to completely redo it to match the iPhone.
I'm guessing you're just a deluded fool.
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The iPhone 1 was highly overpriced and under-speced. No MMS (at the time the ONL
Re: huh (Score:1)
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Major corporate-sponsored permissive-licensed OSS didn't even take off until years after the GPL had established itself
Nonsense. Major BSD UNIX vendors were actively working with upstream sources for BSD-licensed programs back in the '80s. Sun developed and open sourced NFS under a permissive license in 1984. Version 1 of the GPL was released in 1989. Sendmail and Bind both predate the GPL and were developed with commercial backing, as were most of the pieces of software that made the Internet possible.
The anti-GPL / pro-permissive position is, for the most part, completely disconnected with reality.
Pot, meet kettle.
There are multiple real-life examples showing us of how this can go badly for permissive and multiple real-life examples of how GPL enforcement can lead to very worthy projects appearing
And then there's the one that the FSF spent a decade shouting about, where they forced NeXT to releas
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Nonsense. Major BSD UNIX vendors were actively working with upstream sources for BSD-licensed programs back in the '80s.
We appear to have differing definitions of "major" and "corporate-sponsored". Also, if I recall correctly, the precise legal status of BSDs still wasn't settled in the 1980s.
And then there's the one that the FSF spent a decade shouting about, where they forced NeXT to release the source for their Objective-C compiler code in GCC
Although I do think Obj-C is a bit underrated, I've a hard time giving much of a crap. What's your alternate history here? Apple was always going to end up completely dominating Obj-C development.
Meanwhile, I've been using *WRT firmware for a decade and it's great stuff. Linksys did not want to release that firmware; they were force
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I guess English isn't your first language. Or you're just as stupid as the idiots I originally replied to. Apple doesn't have to release most of the source they have released, because it's either their code to begin with (e.g. Objective-C runtime), or licensed such that they have no such obligation (e.g. BSD, MIT). Therefore, the vast majority of code they released is code they didn't have to release. That makes them into the "Good" Guys for the sake of this discussion.
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Apple doesn't have to release most of the source they have released, because it's either their code to begin with (e.g. Objective-C runtime), or licensed such that they have no such obligation (e.g. BSD, MIT). Therefore, the vast majority of code they released is code they didn't have to release. That makes them into the "Good" Guys for the sake of this discussion.
They're as much good guys as Microsoft are good guys for releasing parts of .NET under permissive licenses. There are sound business reasons for doing so, even though neither company is much of a fan about the open source way of doing things (either permissive or GPL.) In Apple's case, it was also probably a deliberate image-building decision back when they were much more niche / underdog than they are today.
It's not a bad thing that they're releasing open source stuff, but let's not kid ourselves about
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I concede that they don't have to release, that wasn't really my thinking. AC didn't say they had to release because of license, for all I know it may be some corporate charter or warm fuzzies that compels them. I genuinely don't know.
I guess I am trying to say I don't know why this is news. As far as I am aware, they have released all previous versions, like AC said. The page https://opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com] seems to imply such.
--
Shit-filled@retard-idiot.com
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That makes two retarded shit-filled idiots. Apple does not have to release the vast majority of the code that they have. Very little, if any, is released under the GPL.
I really wish people would do their homework before slinging around words like 'retarded', 'shit-filled' and 'idiot'. Slinging obscenities just makes you look like one of those cocky foulmouthed gopniks who proved to be so thick and insolent that your mother wrote you off and gave up on teaching you good manners. As for code, it does not have to be released under GPL to be open source and modifiable. I have been told many times by all kinds of pundits that macOS open source code is released under the expre
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The biggest problems I've had with this entire process is getting the nimrods at Apple support to take me seriously when I file a bug report complete with a roadmap of how to fix the error
That is NIH (not invented here) syndrome. Everything good comes from Apple, and if it doesn't come from Apple it must be bad. Except for things they steal, of course, which is most of the big things like the GUI, Mouse, etc.
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Must stop skim reading.... I read that as "Apple just open sourced sex"
Re:huh (Score:5, Informative)
Like they've done with every version? Of course it's only the code they have to release.
Not true. They don't have to release a lot of it; for example, the XNU kernel is licensed under BSD licenses, the BSDish license under which Mach was released, or the APSL, none of which oblige Apple to release any of it.
Re:huh (Score:5, Informative)
Like they've done with every version? Of course it's only the code they have to release.
Not true. They don't have to release a lot of it; for example, the XNU kernel is licensed under BSD licenses, the BSDish license under which Mach was released, or the APSL, none of which oblige Apple to release any of it.
Not to mention all the work their doing with LLVM/Clang. Given it's license, they could have gone closed source (especially after hiring the original creator/s in 2005).
They also hired the main CUPS guy, and while it's GPL, could have insisted that he only do in-house stuff, but they still have him to open source stuff.
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He was referring to the license of LLVM/Clang -- Apple could have made their own closed-source version of LLVM/Clang, as it is BSD-Licensed. Instead, Apple not only kept it open, but they hired the team to keep developing it as open source.
Apple isn't anti-open source; they contribute a lot of code to many projects.
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They could have can kept CUPS development in-house because CUPS was originally dual-licensed (much like Qt).
When you have the source code under a proprietary license, you aren't obligated to release the code. That's why many commercial projects are dual-licensed.
Apple could have easily killed the GPL'd distribution, and used the proprietary license for CUPS that they bought, and only maintained their own version going forward. Apple even hired the developer of CUPS - so they had everything they needed to cl
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Yeah, I'll admire them more when they publish the source code of Quartz as open source.
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I'm not sure that it has all the features and applications that NeXTstep had
GNUstep aimed to implement the OpenStep APIs. Related projects have implemented various apps, but GNUstep itself is a developer platform. GNUstep has been tracking Cocoa, rather than OpenStep, for over a decade now. Some things are mature, others are missing (CoreAnimation is the big omission, unfortunately).
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Yeah, I'll admire them more when they publish the source code of Quartz as open source.
No business case for that, in fact probably a negative one from clones and knock-offs. Like several have pointed out, Apple doesn't have to do this. They do it because it helps to split development costs between them and a bunch of companies using BSD tools/kernel for routers, firewalls, NAS, embedded, web servers etc. and reduces divergence so it's less work to maintain and incorporate patches from others. No real competitor to Apple's consumer products (iPhone, iPad, Macs) uses it and it's unlikely that a
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Why bother?
I'm serious. Why. Bother.
Quartz is a great piece of software, but even if Apple open sourced it, it would probably never make its way into any Linux distribution. The reason: "Not Invented Here" happens whenever humans are involved.
Throwing out yet another composited framebuffer to the community isn't going to magically drive adoption. It'd take a ton of effort to adopt Quartz, and the developers of X.org, Wayland, and Mir are more likely to say "Meh, we already do that" or "Why would we want tha
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I mean, fair enough, the OS code they release is only the code they "have" to release, but that's not to say that Apple isn't contributing heavily to open source.
There's tons of source code they've released that they didn't have to: ...
clang
swiftc
cups (yes, they own it now, they absolutely could close it if they wanted to)
ALAC
GCD
Their CalDAV server
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I mean, fair enough, the OS code they release is only the code they "have" to release
Actually, as I said in another post, they don't even "have" to release all of the OS code. [slashdot.org]
There's tons of source code they've released that they didn't have to: clang ...
...XNU, the C library, a bunch of kernel extensions, and so on.
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People like to bash Sculley (and Cook along with him). But, honestly, Sculley did a good job of running Apple. While it's not entirely a fair comparison, I'd point out that up until around 2008 or so, Apple's largest market-share was during Sculley's tenure. Products like QuickTime and Hypercard were released during his tenure. Apple machines weren't as distinctive, I'll admit, but the designs weren't horrible.
That said, one of the smart things that Sculley did was bring Jean-Louis Gassée over fr
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Jony Ive is too heavily into style over substance, IMHO, and he's the closest Apple has to a "product person."
I don't think anybody can honestly argue that consumers can be expected to maintain their system properly. Virtually every consumer is unable to make the correct decision anyway. If clicking on a link can open malware or compromise your customer's system, your product is shit. That goes for everybody - including Apple.
There are exceptions, but designing for the 0.1% that can actually maintain a comp