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OSX already has it, Darwin Ports
http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/

I'll second this. rsnapshot can be installed via Darwinports (or manually; it's only two files:, a Perl script and a config file) and works beautifully on OS X.

I've written up an rsnapshot on OS X howto as well as an overview of my own backup system.

I'm now using an external Firewire drive for my backups (the above hasn't been update to reflect this yet) and have written a wrapper script for rsnapshot that mounts the drive before running and unmounts it after. I'll be updating the article soon with details.

A Mac Mini costs $600, so a PS3 isn't exactly THAT expensive and offers far more gaming and multimedia potential than a Mac Mini.

A Mac mini computer can run games for developed for Cocoa, Carbon, DHTML, SWF, or Java. This includes every Warcraft game (including WoW), a large library of shareware and freeware specifically for Mac, as well as a metric b*ttload of casual web games. As Darwine matures, this number of compatible titles will only increase. But your comparison to the PS3 is apt because Linux also has a library of freeware games.

The adoption of the network stack in Windows from BSD licensed code is a success as far as advocates of the BSD code are concerned. It is in no way open. For some reason a lot of people who are GPL advocates see it as a failure and a reason why BSD licensing is flawed, as though it was not doing exactly what the developers intended.

This entire argument is based upon your notion of what a success is. That is entirely subjective and not a point worth arguing.

I understand and I agree that this is a success insofar as the BSD developers are concerned. My comments are and have been, strictly speaking, my opinion concerning Apple's claims for open source and how I "believe" in a different religion. So, when you say my argument is based upon my notion of what success is, you ought to realize that yes, I'm writing my opinion on Apple's open source effectiveness and how it falls short of how the BSDs do it. Why would you think elsewise? It's a I'm-frustrated-so-let's-vent-and-talk-about-how-th ings-ought-to-be comment. Feel free to "correct" me in saying that Apple's doing a damn fine job with the Darwin project. Please. Because as much as I'd rather Darwin succeeded with flying colors, I just don't see that as where it's going. Especially in light of such open source projects like FreeBSD. Darwin has no hopes of being a standalone OS anymore and although that may not mean anything to you, that is a crushing reality to a lot of people who had hoped for and had worked for that. It didn't help that Apple led them on.

I think that collaboration between a given user of some code and other users and the community can be very valuable. That does not, however, mean it is the goal of licensing code.

I'm not sure who you're arguing against here about licensing. We are on the same page as far as I'm concerned with that topic.

Apple doesn't keep Darwin open so that they can get collaboration from hobbyists. They keep it open as a way to aid developers for OS X make things work better on OS X and understand bugs.

And now we get to the meat of our disagreement. Are the volunteer developers for FreeBSD nothing more than hobbyists to you? Is the spirit of BSD solely to be open source to aid developers for their respective platforms? Clearly, it is not. The BSDs are best served in a fashion similar to how they currently serve the public. And I have been saying this entire time that should Apple ever lower itself to supporting a project such as FreeBSD, Good Things(tm) will happen and they as well as others will benefit greatly from such efforts. To say we have the Darwin sources just to aid development for OS X and understand bugs is not what Apple led us to believe Darwin was. If you don't believe me, why don't you do me a favor and read up a bit at opendarwin.org before it closes completely. Then, if you can tell me with a straight face and with no reservations that Apple is honoring the BSDs with Darwin I will buy you a beer for your efforts.

That may not be what you wish they would do, but that does not make it antithetical to the goals of those who licensed their code as BSD in the first place.

Right. The primary goals were served, but there is more to be had. And that is more along the lines of libre software, as you mentioned. I think the rest of your post was based on a simple misunderstandings which really aren't worth dragging out much further. We are both being overly literal and argumentative when we out to be figurative and general. Sure, let's argue about details, but first let's at least agree to what we're talking about. It's almost like we're picking apart the words and not really listening to each other.

That's about all I've got to say really. If you're ever in Ohio you ought to at least try and get that free beer. At least the conversation will be interesting.

Cheers

I think you need to read up on the current state of Apple's open source development initiative. I believe the process for submitting a kernel patch goes something like this:

1. Obtain the source by reaching up into the ivory tower and taking it. Notice that you're fetching tarballs over http, not svn or cvs. I'll bet that's current.
2. Beat yourself with a stick trying to build it until you discover darwinbuild.
3. Develop your patch.
4. Submit a bug to the Radar.
5. Announce it in Darwin-kernel.
6. Wait.
7. Wait some more...
8. Read this and give up.
9. Go back to whatever *BSD you came from, fool.

So far Apple has done open source as a publicity stunt, not for open source. If it truly were for open source it would have to be run a lot more like the BSD projects are and not like some corporation trying to keep their secrets all tied up by any means necessary. Even if it means crippling Darwin as an OS. If it were truly for open source, they wouldn't use a proprietary build system, either. I suppose we ought to be happy that we even get tarballs, but it doesn't mean I can't be bitter about it. While this may pass some suit's standard for open source, it is clearly not acceptable nor does it pass for what I consider "open source".

• 90% of installers use drag-and-drop installation. Installations for things like drivers, system updates, or third-party system utilities, which put things into ~/Library or /Library come in packages(.pkg) which use Apple's installer program, /Applications/Utilities/Installer.app. It would be possible(easy, actually) to write your own installer, but I've been using OS X since the day OS X came out, and I can't remember running into one.
  
  

• there is no dependency management on the Mac: you can't tell what packages you need to download, and when you upgrade something, things that depend on it may break, or it may break because its dependencies aren't updated

  I'm not sure what you're saying here, but it doesn't seem even close to the way things work.
  
  In OS X, applications are actually folders, but don't appear that way to the user. You can't tell they're folders unless you right-click on an application and choose "Show package contents", which shows you what's inside the folder: the actual executable and that application's dependencies.
  
  Removing one application won't cause another application to break because those other applications' dependencies are inside their respective applications/folders. And you don't need to look up what dependencies a program will need when you are installing, because applications come with their dependencies inside of the application/folder or Installer package. That's why you can drag-and-drop install and uninstall.
  
  I'm not sure if you might be referring to X11 or command-line apps, but there are programs like Fink and DarwinPorts to take care of dependency management and package installation for those.
  
  
• Many applications do check for updates over the internet. Most applicationss which can update this way have "Check for updates" in the application menu, but a few, like Firefox, which aren't very good at using the correct Mac menus, put "Check for updates" in the Help menu.
  
  While I do like the simplicity of a apt, the update-on-launch way of keeping up-to-date works just fine. If an application is allowed to check for updates on its launch, that will make sure that any applications which you actually use do get updated to the current version. It also makes it easy to stay with an older version of a program if you don't want to update.
  
  
• The spell-checker is system-wide, and is available to every application whose developer chooses to use it. Only developers who are too lazy to learn how to do things correctly use their own spell-checker. Off the top of my head, I know of two applications that use their own spell-checker: Appleworks, which hasn't received a major update since OS X came out, and Firefox, whose developers have failed to make Firefox a proper Mac application even after three-and-a-half years in development.*
  
  *Firefox is my main browser.

Actually the Darwine project already has a lot of the PPC/qemu stuff implemented.

http://darwine.opendarwin.org/ (opendarwin is shutting down, so I think most of their docs are being merged into the winehqwiki, http://wiki.winehq.org/ )

I didn't even think to start investigating wine on a mac until after my iBook g3 died and apple announced the Intel macs. I got a MacBookPro back in March and it was not a trivial operation to get regular wine compiled. But crossover is a simple to install as dragging the application to the you harddrive. Halflife 2 works, although I didn't try to playonline, but I did install via steam and it is playable.

Respect it, yes. Abide by it, yes. Agree with it, no. And I think that's the point.

This is why I have ranted for years about why you should always use LGPL when writing library code to ensure that it is truly free for anyone to use for any purpose as long as the library itself remains open. No one is arguing that software vendors should be allowed to close other people's code. But the GPL -is- viral. It does require that everything that uses GPL-licensed code be under a similarly open license. If we're talking about an entire GPL application, that's reasonable. For something that can reasonably be reused like a library routine, it borders on psychological abuse, much like holding a piece of candy in front of a diabetic child....

A classic example of why LGPL is a better license than the GPL is KHTML. Yeah, some of their developers have grumbled about Apple gutting the heck out of it and creating WebKit, but on the flip side, there are a number of really good web browsers (Safari, the current OmniWeb, Swift, GTK+ WebCore, Nokia's osb-browser, the Unity library, etc.) that either would not exist or would not be nearly as standards-compliant were it not for that effort.

Safari is closed source, and I strongly suspect it would not exist (or at least would not be based on KHTML) if KHTML had been licensed under the GPL instead of the LGPL. However, because KHTML is LGPL, it still forced the KHTML portions to remain open so that everyone benefits from improvements to the code base. All of this is possible solely because the KDE folks were sufficiently forward thinking to realize that libraries should be licensed in a way that doesn't preclude their use in closed source.

I'd love to see see more people consider this when they choose to use the GPL. IMHO, the LGPL is a much more sensible license that keeps open code open, but allows its use in close cooperation with closed components. This promotes cooperation between the open source/free software world and the corporate world and results in significant corporate contributions of additional open code. The GPL's us-vs-them mentality stifles cooperation and results in corporations keeping GPL-licensed technology at arms length. While it should be the developer's choice, and while others should respect their choice, it benefits free and open source developers everywhere to encourage developers to choose the LGPL where possible instead of the unnecessarily restrictive GPL. Why build walls when you can build bridges?

Yes, because Linux == KHTML. That's all Linux is. And KDE doesn't run on any other platform but Linux. Those stupid Mac users, how can they hate Linux when the rendering engine of one of the browsers for their OS is Linux!

(Here's a small sampling of platforms that KDE either runs on or is being ported to.)

There's also Crossover Mac coming, from Codeweavers. Not only is this better because the user can buy it instead of waiting on game makers to port stuff, but it's also better because unlike Transgaming, Codeweavers contributes back to WINE.

Of course, there's also vanilla DarWINE, but I haven't had any success with it on my Intel iMac yet.

As I understand it, except for the name Virtual PC for Mac and Virtual PC for Windows are entirely different products.

Not that I care, of course -- I'm much more interested in running Windows apps "natively" with Darwine or Crossover Mac instead.

Neither.

Apple didn't "get" Open Source (that's fine, many of us Free Software enthusiasts don't "get" Open Source either) and began deprecating it when it started to interfere with their other plans in general. The first to be deprecated was the open-sourciness, with Apple releasing code but generally not in a "community friendly" way and rarely making it easy for the community to contribute directly back.

There's no evil in that, if you're strongly opinionated about the direction code should take, and you have the resources to write it yourself, you don't necessarily want to spend time trying to integrate everyone else's changes with your own.

Some people noticed. In particular, the KHTML people got a little fed up with people pointing out that WebKit supported some feature or other that hadn't made it into KHTML yet. They explained that the changes to WebKit weren't easy to track and back-port. This was interpreted by the meeja, including Slashdot, as KHTML slapping down Apple, rather than slapping down the people who assume that simply because X is based on Y, Y can easily incorporate changes to X, and who keep flaming the developers of Y for not doing this.

Then Apple closed XNU-Intel. Yes, they did. There are several releases of XNU-Intel for which source code apparently will never be released (though who would want them?) Some people noticed. They pointed this out and were immediately hounded by a bunch of, for the most part, obnoxious Mac zealots who claimed this wasn't true because at some point in the future, Apple might change their mind, and any way, who said their mind had been made up, I mean, Apple hasn't made an official announcement, right? To make matters worse, Apple's one comment on this was so inane it simply fueled the fire. One developer at Apple, posting on an Apple mailing list, said that the talk of XNU-Intel being "closed" was "speculation" and people shouldn't assume anything.

This was meaningless and largely wrong. Those saying it was closed were right: it was. You couldn't download the source to XNU-Intel. When you're stating a fact, you're not engaging in speculation.

There was much anger at this point because many people felt lied to. Apple had been advertising the openness of Darwin for a long time, and "Team Apple*" had been loud in repeating this supposed advantage, and now, without any explanation, the core of Darwin was now closed. Team Apple responded by claiming the Apple developer who said "speculation" had actually used the word "yet", and the "yet" word was used in pretty much every response to anyone critical of Apple or simply pointing out the fact that XNU-Intel was closed. Team Apple changed tact on the "Open Source is an advantage of Mac OS X" thing too, claiming it was never Apple's intention to release a useful operating system as open source, and that nobody cares about operating system kernels anyway. Needless to say, this intensified the anger.

What do we have today?

Apple has taken considerable steps to undo the damage. There's still no real explanation as to why XNU-Intel was closed. No technologies were announced yesterday whose existance could be discerned by looking at the kernel - which has supported the Intel architecture since its original release, which has supported the Xeon CPU range even back in the Panther days, and probably long before. It was not necessary to withhold the XNU source before the release of the PowerMac G5, or, indeed, any of the recent radical changes in architecture. Meanwhile, the software-related announcements this week don't appear to have anything to do with the Tiger kernel.

So, anyway, leaving aside the nonsense that it's "been confirmed" that the withholding of the source "was due to Apple's policy of not commenting upon unreleased products", we don't have an explanatio

See also: Darwine, which has been working on integrating Wine with QEMU, for running on PPC, for some time now. There doesn't seem to any word on it's future in light of OpenDarwin closing, but I suspect they'll continue their work.

It wasn't too god-awful, actually. I worked with the S60 port of GTK+/KHTML, because it's less painful than Webcore/Webkit, and basically just followed in Nokia's footprints. I had to port several underlying libraries, including Freetype and a massively hacked Nano-X (which I've been slowly replacing with something home-grown, built on top of a platform-specific fast graphics library.)

I've got mostly-correct rendering, correct ECMA/DHTML and good (not great) font rendering. International fonts are tremendously broken. PNG works better than it does on IE. It's pretty reasonably fast, and the browser footprint is about 950k, plus another 200k from support libraries and 300k from the fonts I built in. It's enough to use to roll certain other applications, as long as I'm careful about their RAM usage.

This is actually the reason I originally started the DS WiFi Bounty. The IRC clients and whatnot that are now being built are amusing, but I have bigger plans. (No, the web browser isn't the apex of what I'm doing.)

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
WebKit and Apple's Open Source Efforts

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

Why Darwin Failed

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?

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
WebKit and Apple's Open Source Efforts

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

Why Darwin Failed

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?

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
WebKit and Apple's Open Source Efforts

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

Why Darwin Failed

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?

I started out using Fink 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 and found this comforting post. To summarize, DarwinPorts is alive and well and will continue. Time to start using www.darwinports.org rather than www.opendarwin.org.

I started out using Fink 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 and found this comforting post. To summarize, DarwinPorts is alive and well and will continue. Time to start using www.darwinports.org rather than www.opendarwin.org.

Not much - http://opendarwin.org/pipermail/darwinports/2006-J uly/034946.html

I wonder what will happen to DarwinPorts.

The nightly builds of Safari have also gained a similar feature. See this WebKit blog post. It's pretty slick, and very helpful for debugging CSS nits.

Hey that sounds great. However one more thing I need to know "Is It FREE".

I'm not sure what you mean by FREE. If you mean Open Source, then probably not (though
http://www.opendarwin.org/ , etc). If you mean $0, then almost certainly not (though there are plenty of ports of open source software, and unported stuff generally ports trivially if you're willing to run X11)

Also can we run Data Center of a REAL organization on Macs? I know we can do it on Solaris.

I guess it depends what you need to do, but without knowing your specific needs, I'd guess so. (See also my other post to your other questions)

One is the number of options. Can't do it this way, try that way. You aren't forced to do things the same way everybody does, there may be another more efficient way to do the particular type of work that you do.

That's a completely theoretical argument. Could you name some exact situations where OS X forced you to do something that was not as efficient as it could have been if they had given you multiple options? If we're just talking theory, then it could also be said that it doesn't matter how many options there are to do something as long as the best one is available. If the best one can be presented, then what's the point in offering less efficient options?

With synaptic or adept, available in any Debian-like Linux, you have tens of thousands of software packets which you can install with a couple of mouse clicks. Installing software on the Mac is also very easy, but you have to get that software before you start installing.

Simply not true. With Fink or DarwinPorts, you can install software in the same way that programs like apt-get handle it. While they don't have quite as many packages in them as Debian's repositories, they've still got more than most people would ever need to install; if there's something they don't have, there's nothing stopping you from downloading and compiling it yourself. Sure, there are a few programs that don't work -- but the whole point of the open source community is that surely there's another option you can use, right?

The layout paradigm used by CSS (and HTML) is quite different. If you look at `desktop GUI toolkits` - ala GTK, Qt, or even Java's AWT/Swing, they have many different layout models - flow based, border based, spring based, grid based (those are Java). The layout techniques offered by CSS dont seem to fit into any of these well (if I were forced to pick one, I would say its most like the flow layout).

My question is: how does one replicate the flexible layout ideas using CSS? I cant seem to figure out a good way to create `scalable` pages with HTML and CSS without the use of hacks. It seems like the Safari developers are giving `scalable` layouts some thought (ref: http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=55 and http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=56). Em's and percents do make it work somewhat, but they dont cut it IMHO.

I understand that the popular use of bitmap (as opposed to vector based images) on the web is one of the primary reasons for non-scalable designs - but desktop applications with the flexible layout techniques seem to look much better on physically small screens with high resolutions.

I do like the direction SVG is going in, and hopefully IE will one day support.

The layout paradigm used by CSS (and HTML) is quite different. If you look at `desktop GUI toolkits` - ala GTK, Qt, or even Java's AWT/Swing, they have many different layout models - flow based, border based, spring based, grid based (those are Java). The layout techniques offered by CSS dont seem to fit into any of these well (if I were forced to pick one, I would say its most like the flow layout).

My question is: how does one replicate the flexible layout ideas using CSS? I cant seem to figure out a good way to create `scalable` pages with HTML and CSS without the use of hacks. It seems like the Safari developers are giving `scalable` layouts some thought (ref: http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=55 and http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=56). Em's and percents do make it work somewhat, but they dont cut it IMHO.

I understand that the popular use of bitmap (as opposed to vector based images) on the web is one of the primary reasons for non-scalable designs - but desktop applications with the flexible layout techniques seem to look much better on physically small screens with high resolutions.

I do like the direction SVG is going in, and hopefully IE will one day support.

RFC3546, section 3.1 specifies server name indication. mod_gnutls has supported it since April of 2005. mod_ssl (bug) is waiting on OpenSSL to make support possible. Opera has supported SNI since 8.0. IE7 has since beta 2. Mozilla/NSS/Firefox is ready to go with NSS 3.1.1/Gecko 1.8.1/Firefox 2.0. Konqueror will support it in 4.0 (bug). Safari is the only major browser without support (fresh bug).

Which means that someone wants to change his UI, he'll have to build a new UI himself.

I think they have open sourced a UI as well:

http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/S60WebKit:Rei ndeer

From http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/S60Webkit:

"The MemoryManager, WebKit and Reindeer components are covered by the Nokia BSD license. The WebCore and JavaScriptCore components are covered by the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The Netscape Plug-in API is a ported version of the open source plug-in interface from Netscape Communications Corporation, which is covered by the Netscape Public License v1.1."

Darwin never contained GPL code.

Err, umm, are you saying that Samba isn't GPL code?

Or did you mean to say "xnu" when you said "Darwin"?

yep, in the nightlies. Came in this January.

Is this new Darwin version COMPLETELY new, with no trace of GPL-protected code?

If you look at the Darwin source tree you will see that there are a number of components with "Other" licenses. Any GPL or LGPL code will be in these trees. A quick look through the first few "Other" entries finds Chess, JBoss, and MySQL, and of course gcc and its component parts are GPLed.

But just because something's GPLed doesn't mean it can't be used by or distributed with a proprietary kernel or OS. After all, Microsoft is inlcuding Interix in Windows Vista, and Interix ships with many of the same GPLed components as Darwin and Mac OS X such as gcc...

I know I'm in a minority, but I used Darwin/x86 quite a bit since it had NetInfo support so I could use it for shared login, and while I could switch to everything to LDAP, it wasn't worth the effort. I currently got an Intel Macintosh, but maybe my next purchase won't be a Mac, because I do/did use Darwin quite a bit. That being said, the Macworld UK article doesn't cite sources, so where is it getting this info? I still see the xnu sources on OpenDarwin's site:

http://darwinsource.opendarwin.org/10.4.6.ppc/

Why not get informed first before speculating...

Apple continues to make available the BSD userland and tool chain for each point release of Mac OS X via releasing the related Darwin source tree (both PowerPC and Intel).

Also Apple has many active open source projects using BSD, LGPL, and their own APSL that they either wholly developed or have greatly enhanced.

Apple WebKit && Offical WebKit
Darwin Streaming Server

Users in demanding fields such as biosciences or meteorology do hack OS kernels to slim them down, alter the balance between throughput and computing, and to open them to the resources of a massive grid.

*Extremely* old news.

Also, "Mac OS X" has ALWAYS been proprietary. It's sensationalistic and shoddy journalism to say that "Mac OS X is now closed". Mac OS X has ALWAYS been closed. It's Darwin that has been open. And "Darwin" is more than a bootable OS: Darwin is Apple's open source strategy AND an OS; but the usefulness has always come from the open source components of the OS, not the usefulness of Darwin as an OS itself. Darwin's usefulness as an OS is, shall we say, "limited" at best, and always has been.

This has been beaten to death on the darwin-dev list, and there is no new information. Apple has taken no new recent action whatsoever, and in fact, the most recent action is that it has opened up more source code in the x86 tree, not less. Indeed, all of the traditional Darwin source with the notable exception of the kernel itself:

The thing that's not open in the x86 tree is xnu (the kernel), and it's not possible to create a fully bootable binary x86 Darwin OS, as it is for PPC. In the Darwin/OpenDarwin community, this has been discussed for months.

In fact, this article by Rob Braun (formerly of Apple, and a member of the OpenDarwin core team) was published in February 2006: http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html. This was then covered on slashdot, to which Rob issued this response: http://www.opendarwin.org/~bbraun/slashdot_respons e.html. These two discussions cover the issues very well.

I predict, however, that this Macworld UK article will be seen as "new news", and will be picked up by the tech outlets, and trumpeted, exactly as the headline hopes, as "Apple closes down OS X", even though the source for pretty much everything (except the kernel and drivers) is still available. In other words, everything that a normal person needs Darwin sources for is available. In 5 years, I can think of ONE instance where I looked to the kernel source for confirmation of something, and that was only for *confirmation*, and only because it was convenient - not because I needed to rebuild the kernel. I know of no other non-developer/programmer Mac OS X adminisrators/system engineers/enterprise users who have ever had any reason to rebuild the kernel or any drivers.

If the kernel and driver source were available, it would, however, be used for one purpose: to churn out hacks to get OS X to run on non-Apple hardware in a much faster and higher-quality way than has been possible to date. Will OS X be hacked anyway to run on non-Apple hardware, and will it continue to be, regardless? Yes. If people are willing to replace enough of the OS with the ugliness they're using to get it to work, absolutely. But it will continue to be ugly. Releasing kernel and driver source for the current iterations of OS X on x86 will only make their jobs infinitely easier, while brining little to no benefit to conventional users, power users, and administrators of OS X.

I'm sure people will find a way to make a huge deal about this, though, even though a huge deal has already been made about it in various forums, including slashdot and other tech news outlets, and on several of Apple's mailing lists.

I'd like to point out that this was my initial reaction: http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0602 &L=macenterprise&T=0&P=58970

Since then, Apple has posted all of the APSL sources, and it was just a legitimate, honest delay. The PPC and x86 trees are at virtual parity with the sole exception of the kernel and drivers. So I'd submit that "Apple closes down OS X" is highly inaccurate for two reasons:

- Most of OS X was never "open" to begin with; if he wants to say "Darwin", great, but I suppose "Apple closes down Darwin" wouldn't be as sensationalistic and guaranteed to get as many page v

Yes - but in a different way. Safari renders HTML using a system component called WebKit. A growing number of tools use WebKit to provide rich text display - for instance, Adium, Fire, and Colloquy (two IM clients and an IRC one) use it for their very pretty message displays. Mail uses it for showing HTML email. Most apps use a WebKit-based help viewer.

So, like an IE hole hitting you no matter if you use IE or not, a WebKit hole can be opened from a lot of places. On the other hand, patches generally get rolled out pretty quickly, and there's nothing quite as system-exposing as ActiveX to worry about!!

Only good for an X11 envrionment ? Try to explain this to the darwine team of opendarwin or the ReactOS developper team...

Only good for an X11 envrionment ? Try to explain this to the darwine team of opendarwin or the ReactOS developper team...

As usual, nothing official is coming from Apple, or hasn't survived long enough before being crushed/sued.

For now Boot Camp is just a dual boot tool.

But rumors, and speculations (from I, Cringely) are that Apple may try to develop some virtualisation solution to have Vista run on top of MacOS X. (And so you'll be able to play your Win32/DirectX games sand boxed inside a MacOS X environment).

On the other hand, the opendarwin community is working on a WINE implementation called DarWine which aims at porting Wine to MacOS X for Intel and PowerPC (thanks to qemu).

As usual, nothing official is coming from Apple, or hasn't survived long enough before being crushed/sued.

For now Boot Camp is just a dual boot tool.

But rumors, and speculations (from I, Cringely) are that Apple may try to develop some virtualisation solution to have Vista run on top of MacOS X. (And so you'll be able to play your Win32/DirectX games sand boxed inside a MacOS X environment).

On the other hand, the opendarwin community is working on a WINE implementation called DarWine which aims at porting Wine to MacOS X for Intel and PowerPC (thanks to qemu).

This was just posted: High DPI Part 2

That's called Darwine (WINE and ReactOS share a codebase).

there have been a lot of work on that!!! It's called http://darwine.opendarwin.org/ and it's not yet stable...

That's odd, because last I checked, the code that drives Safari (not the GUI but the frameworks that do all the actual work) are based on KHTML and open source. If Apple wanted to use a bunch of undocumented APIs to make Safari better than everyone else's software, an open-source project would probably not be the place to do it.

Just imagine: in the near future, you could buy a Mac, and you'd get the beautiful GUI, the rock-solid stability of Unix, and the ability to run all your old Windows apps.

And Steve Jobs finally defeats Bill Gates for good. Lovely.

The Proper Context for Apple and Open Source

Ok, so it's unlikely to happen anyways - but if one were to toy around with the thought that Macs would rise to take a significant portion of the operating systems used, what would that mean? Not much, from my point of view. It would just mean new vendor lock-in, and probably even worse interoperability as the Apple specific formats become more common. While today WMA, DOC, XLS and PPT are enough trouble, we'd add AAC, CWK, SIT and what have you to the list. DRM will be just as common and prevalent (witness Fairplay and iTunes).

I'll readily admit that I don't know much about Macs and the formats that are used, maybe most are or are becoming open - I just know that every so often I get a file I can't open from a Mac user (yesterday, an AppleWorks file was the most recent). It was the same when I used Windows, so apparently little has changed over the years. That I can open MS files is just because the community has been so hard at work deciphering the formats and reimplementing them. If Apple becomes any more common, the community possibly would have to start over.

The way that Apple has handled any open source connections to their OS and other products quite clearly shows that they only want to take advantage of it, not contribute back [1] [2] [3]. While open standards and open source is not the same thing, and standards is IMO more important, they share a lot of common attributes and philosophy behind. I don't think Apple is interested in either.

It's quite possible that Apple makes a great OS, and great hardware, but it is also quite clear that they are just as predatory and monopolistic as ever Microsoft - they just haven't had the numbers to make the same impact. And I couldn't care which vendor tries to lock me hard to their platform and their DRM, it's all bad in either case. Until Apple decides to play fair with the rest of the world I won't be thinking any better of them than I do MS - being the underdog does not excuse bad behaviour, nor does "but they are doing it".

Being pragmatic to me does not only mean "use what works" it also means looking at what "will work" - and what will continue to do so.

(PS, I can't get a new, open format copy of the cwk file I received until the end of April due to vacations - anyone know of anything that can read this format on a Linux system? Thanks. DS)

What you're looking for is Darwine.

Welcome to the other side :)

I think the tools you are looking for are:
    - HandBrake (free, but donations welcome)
    - Toast ($$)
For your Unix stuff:
      - Darwin Ports
      - Fink
and for others:
      - Version tracker
and mac games:
      - Inside Mac Games

Also be sure to check out Adiumx.com, vlc, MPlayer OS X and the software from omnigroup.com