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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.
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.