Slashdot Mirror
Apple Open Sources OS X?/Jobs Permanent CEO
sudama writes "This report claims that OS X will be completely open source, 'like the popular Linux operating system.' " This is pretty fresh from someone hearing Job's keynote at Macworld, so don't plan your life around this or anything. They've been planning on releasing the core for some time now. The question is how much of the OS will be released. under an open source license.A lot of people have been writing with the word that Steve Jobs, surprise, surprise, has dropped interim from his title. Yes, Dict-er-CEO-for-Life Jobs is back.
Not clever marketing, just bad reporting. They're not opening the whole thing, just Darwin and some components - and it's already been done, and yes, you can download it. http://publicsource.apple.com/
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
That's probably because OS/X is based on NeXT, which *drumroll* Window Maker and Afterstep both clone.
Aqua's the new OSX interface; no one's used it yet (outside Apple anyway) but there are plenty of previews. Check it out at http://www.apple.com/macosx.
It's very pretty, and frankly I wonder if Apple fired its own graphic design team and hired a legion of demo-coders to implement it instead; it's undoubtedly the coolest-looking interface I've ever seen (with the possible exception of the BlueSteel theme for E, and the supposed interface for the new AmigaOS which, sadly, never showed).
However, the good looks don't always translate to practicality; check out the three buttons at the top of the window (I think they look like jewels). They look exactly alike, except for color, until you mouse over them. Then all three get little symbols (X for clode, + for maximize, - for minimize) embedded in the jewels. It's still bad interface, though.
In other words, Apple isn't getting it completely right with this revision. Hopefully they'll correct the mistakes by the time OSX is released; then it'll be really cool.
RFC959 wrote: I don't know what graphics system OSX uses, but I suspect it's either X-like or MacOS-like. We're talking about multi-user machines here, remember? X is what you wanted to get rid of, and MacOS is built with the assumption that you've got one machine, one framebuffer, and one user (and one GUI!) in your "computing environment", none of which is necessarily true anymore, making it an unsuitable starting point.
You're right. You don't know what graphics system Mac OS X uses. It uses a lightweight window server (which runs as it own process) with multiple rendering engines, including Display PDF, Quickdraw, and OpenGL. This is not like the graphics system on most other OS's. It relies on high speed IPC to implement a client/server graphics solution.
See Mac OS X Graphics for a newbie and shallow overview, and a technical overview from Stepwise's WWDC '99 Graphics Coverage
This system has some real tangible end user benefits. For example, even when an app is busy waiting, an end user can still move that app's windows and panels and the refresh of the window still happens (unlike Windows where you start getting lots and lots of white space). Since the lightweight window server maintains the backing store, you get great UI performance even with sluggish apps. This model may have performance benefits compared to the overhead of lots of threads... it's a different approach as compared to the BeOS approach... both have their strengths and weaknesses and both are superior to most other graphics systems available.
As for age, this system is an evolution of the Display Postscript window server model introduced in NeXTstep in 1988. It's not new, but it is significantly enhanced and competitors still haven't achieved the 2D graphics user experience given in the original NeXTstep 1.0
OSX stems from Next which ran on x86 stuff fine. In the beggining apple was going to support x86 port of it too. There are two reasons they aren't now. 1. Microsoft 2. Hardware control. The fact is that apple likes having nice hardware control. Remember when they switched from 68k to PPC? Only apple can do that. How about the switch from adb to usb, apple is why usb finally caught on. The reason macOS is much better than win 9x with less development cost is because apple controls their hardware.
Side issues:
The problem with mac emulators are that apple has rom's on every mac that you need to run macOS. Those roms are illigal to copy and distribute.
Serios sysadmins are thinking of running serious systems on mac hardware. Buy 2 G4s install linux or OSX and you have full redundancy, great speed, and decent price.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
Now, what I'd like to know is why they didn't just adopt Linux for the kernel and toss a MacOS API on top of that. Oh yeah-- and do something about making QuickTime available for Linux, too.
Isn't the problem with QuickTime for Linux the various codecs that are used by it, like Sorensen?
I thought that was the reason there isn't a client for Linux that can play most of the movies that are on the web.
There is however a library for QuickTime at this page.
This is from that page.
Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many different kinds of compression formats. What you know as "Quicktime 4" is really a distribution of libraries which contain certain compression formats not found in previous versions Quicktime. Regardless of the version number, each Quicktime distribution is able to read and write a basic set of compression formats that you can manipulate on Linux or any system not officially supported by Apple. Only a few of these compression formats are built in Quicktime for Linux because 99% of Linux developers can't use any commercial code in their software. Since 1998 Apple has licensed all the internet video formats for their own use. What you can do is create Quicktime movies.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
The very fact the a company that makes very good hardware (compared to some of the things that the PC market has) but has an interface that is a little geek limiting (I really like command lines and such) is now taking the opportunity to make a unix like interface that dosn't need to have totally graphical features and is Open Source! This is quite nice as well because it will also have full hardware support and be free of some of the hoop jumping of other PPC and related OSs.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
If MS open-sourced Win2k - and provided a license that wasn't completely obnoxious - would you use it? When the first group scrapped the UI, ported X/[WM of choice], and posted the tarball, would you run to download it? Would you volunteer to fix the problems in the Registry, or ACLs, or the DCOM subsystems? How about dumping that eMac WM/GTK theme, and just running OS X, with the latest set of patches from [mythical OS X guru]? Would you give up your spare time to help with the ports to OS X? Or will you instead write another CD player for Linux?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
"OS X will be completely open source, like the popular Linux operating system, with Quartz, Open GL and QuickTime all built in."
Items of note:
1) The third phrase ("with Quartz...") has nothing to do with the first two, so the real quote is "OS X will be completely open source, like the popular Linux operating system...".
2) "Completely" implies the whole thing, so Rob's (?) question is answered.
3) What does "open source like...Linux..." mean? GPL?
4) This entire thing is clearly smoke out of someone's ass. Why don't we wait until Apple's announcement of the anonymous CVS password before we piss our pants in excitement.
---
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Actually, they probably didn't adopt Linux for the kernel because MacOS X is basically NeXTStep 5.0.
NeXTStep, for those of you who haven't been around that long, was the Mach/BSD-based OS that Jobs' previous company, NeXT, created in the late 80's. NeXTStep was way, way ahead of its time, but the developers made some choices which ended up being different from what the rest of the world did -- using Objective-C instead of C++ was the biggest one. Of course, the _incredible_ GUI development libraries and utilities of NeXTStep were later retooled into "OpenStep", and there is now at least one free-software project to reimplement it (GNUStep).
I have no doubt that the "advanced OO development environment" called "Cocoa" is actually just another retooling of the NeXTStep libraries/utilities. Which is fine, 'cuz they really are good.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I've been watching Steve Jobs' Reality-Distortion effect via QT4, and some people are missing a fine distinction. The lowest-level "Darwin" code is to be open-source, not Apple's proprietary higher-level OS (Carbon, Quartz, Cocoa, and all the other goofily-named bits).
Darwin is pretty much analagous to the Linux kernel, though it is Mach-based, rather than a monolithic kernel.
The BSD-based system interface that rides slightly above Darwin is also to be open-source, which is not surprising since it derives from the various *BSD's out there.
Judging from some discussion on various mailing lists, a lot of the developers are not too impressed with the slow speed at which Apple has been releasing source. This may be typical online whining though. Several Apple people have responded back in a very sincere-sounding manner, asking for patience. I'm inclined to agree with them, since Apple has really only jumped into this Open Source thing recently, and it takes a long time for things to change in a large company. As well, they have to make sure the code they post really belongs to them, that it's in decent enough shape to share, etc. Give 'em a little more time, I say.
Now, what I'd like to know is why they didn't just adopt Linux for the kernel and toss a MacOS API on top of that. Oh yeah-- and do something about making QuickTime available for Linux, too.