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Darwin Source Completely Available

Posted by Nik on from the NP:-Janie's-got-a-gun dept.

The AC crowd were the first to write in with the news. From Wilfredo Sanchez's diary at Advogato, "Today another big milestone has come up. I imported the sources to the kernel into the Darwin CVS repository today, which means that at this point all of the sources needed to build Darwin are available externally for the first time." For those not in the know, Darwin is the foundation on which MacOS X is based. It's a BSD Unix, including significant contributions from the NetBSD and FreeBSD kernel and userland code.

4 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. John Carmack's X-Windows for Darwin... by chexc · · Score: 5

    ...should be ready soon.

    The OS X Server version is already running - http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Workbench/2000-02 -14.01.html

  2. Re:Why didn't Apple go with Linux? by Arandir · · Score: 5

    With the GPL there would have been ACs all over them from day one to release their unworkable alpha code (cf Corel). Anything they derived from Darwin (the rest of Mac) would need to be sourced as well, but I suspect they have NDAs with other companies that prohibit this.

    I could go on an on, but I'll stop. In short, a BSD or MIT license allows a company to go Open Source without inadvertantly running afoul of someone else's copyright.

    --
    A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  3. Re:is there info on Darwin? by chetohevia · · Score: 5
    Darwin is the core, based on BSD, upon which OS X (pronounced "ten", not "ex", but spelled as X for the allusion to *nix and its stability) there's a great deal of information-- especially in reviews of the Developer's Preview Releases-- on arstechnica.com.

    Apple is exposing (correct me if i'm wrong here) three APIs-- one for Darwin, which is most of the BSD/Unix api's, one for "Carbon"-- halfway between old-style mac stuff and the newest-coolest, and "Cocoa", which aside from being a lame reference to Java, should provide real advantages in speed, and of course stability. Did I get that right?

    anyway, it looks like lots of Linux stuff should now be trivial to port to mac, and THIS IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE because it means that Windows will have less software than Mac or Linux. cool.

  4. Re:OSX vs BSD by friedo · · Score: 5
    Well, Darwin itself isn't that special, it's just a basic BSD. What's cool about MacOS X, though, is that it can do many cool things that no BSD can:
    • First ever vector-based display engine for a GUI (Quartz)
    • Standardized XML-based config files for most things
    • Extremely easy configuration tools for Apache, FTP, NFS, etc etc.
    • It runs on a G4 with AltiVec optimization: Way more powerful than an Intel box for most things
    • The new app development environment is completely object-oriented; this is inherited from NeXTStep.
    • Will run classic MacOS and Rhapsody apps through abstraction layers (carbon and cocoa)
    • At the very bottom is Mach, which is reputed to be Way Cool, but I don't know much about it.