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Apple Announces Darwin 1.0
Quite a number of folks have written in with announcement from Apple saying that Darwin 1.0 is released. It's got the BSD core that's been discussed before, along with Mach 3.0 - and here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX, at least in some fashion or another.
today is a banner day for the attention deficit crowd. reading comprehension courses are available.
What about Intel? Will it happen? OS X on an open platform might be good.
What started the whole GNUstep/OpenStep API debate in the first place was Steve Jobs telling the CEO of Spindletop (http://www.gnustep.com/) that he was stealing Apple intellectual property by distributing GNUstep.
Lucas Wagner (lwagner@spindletp.com), the said CEO of Spindletop and GNUstep hack, told him that it would be a great benefit to Apple if GNUstep and Apple could work together with Apple to mutually promote their technology. Spindletop, of course, would distribute it. Steve Jobs didn't like this and said it was blatantly stealing Apple intellectual property.
i think GNUstep and Spindletop have both been really favorable to Apple, and this came as a bit of a shock to everyone involved.
I have spoken with Lucas and he has been pretty positive about the situation. He told me that he knew, when he began the company, this issue would arise, so it's good that the project is getting it over with now rather than later, when GNUstep will be "conscious". he didn't want to comment about any further actions from Apple, probably for legal reasons.
from what i can see on gnu.gnustep.discuss, RMS has been contacted about the issue. Development on GNUstep has temporarily halted as they try to sort out licensing issues. it looks like there might be something else that might be going on that nobody's speaking about, but I'm not sure.
> I am not sure but I would hazard a guess that the Apple Public License is NOT a certified (by
> OSI) Open Source (TM) licence.
It's close but not quite. It has the so-called "termination clause", where Apple can revoke all rights under the license under certain conditions. This makes it a bad choice for people to base their projects on if they want to be sure they'll be around in a few years.
> As an aside, anyone know why the didn't just use a BSD license?
See above.
> Finally, could anyone tell me if they know whether or not OSX is OpenStep compliant?
Think of it as the evolution of OpenStep. It's based upon all the old NeXT stuff, updated for modern times and with some new ideas.
> ie, when Quicktime for OSX is released, would it be possible to run it under GNUstep?
Only if enough information about OS X is made public for GNUstep or someone to write a compatible replacement. Darwin does not contain any of the object oriented toolkit stuff.
But Quicktime for OS X will be compiled for the PPC, so most of us won't care anyway.
> And further, what are people's opinions on OpenStep/GNUstep?
It doesn't seem to be too hot nowadays.
> and I think that given all the discussion going on lately about cross platform compatability, we
> should just go ahead and have all the distros be OpenStep compliant.
There isn't much OpenStep code out there. Mac OS X won't be OpenStep either. So there really isn't that much of a reason to do this.
On the outside, they cultivate an appearance of being the "good guys", devoted to public wlefare, something for people who think differently than the crowd. Celebrities extol the virtues of each, telling us how Dianetics saved their lives, or how much easier to use an iBook is. But when you look deep inside, it becomes clear that each is nothing more than a cult, whose ranks consist of emotional weaklings or the mentally unstable. Each has a leader who is attributed with godlike powers: They say that L. Ron could talk to aliens, and that Steve Jobs could bring Apple back to profitability. No evidence of either exists, mind you, but to the delusional followers of each, it is as true as the sun rising in the West each morning.
Beware of Apple, Slashgeeks.
C'mon Chris, just because everyone at VA gets to use linux as their main OS (as do I where I werk) doesn't mean that there isn't at least 100 mac desktop users and 1000 win-dos desktop (l)users for every linux desktop user (these are of course just numbers I'm throwing out as guesses). Even tho you can go and buy a copy of RH, Mandrake etc at Frys or wherenot, doesn't mean that lots of people ARE doing it for their home desktop (especuially people like my mom who just PREFERS Macs)
anyway...
[/OKAYIMDONE]
As a mac bigot i represent that remark! Wait, that isnt right... i _used_ to represent that remark :) The best page for a good laugh is this guy. Be sure to look at the comparison between MacOS, Allegro (MacOS 9ish), and Next at the bottom. Be careful though, this poor server is a PowerMac 6150/66 or so running MacOS... vintage 1994 hardware.
--
Yah, I know noone will probably read this comment, but your comment about the clone makers not having any R&D is kinda hypocritical. Apple _refused_ to license the MacOS for anything besides an Apple- licensed motherboard. During the second phase of cloning, the clone companies were going to be allowed to make their own designs, but it was at that point, after they spent the money but before they got the license, that the clones were "steved."
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
Now if Darwin is the core of OSX, is OSX cross-platform? I haven't heard anything about that... Anyone know anything?
It's already been reported that OS X for Intel has been circulating within Apple. However, I wouldn't count on a release anytime soon. But, in line with this, Apple is apparently in talks with Intel box manufacturers.
Major speculation available here.
Besides, Quartz is not something that comes out from NeXT.
NeXT used a Display Postscipt engine. Quartz uses a PDF-based engine which lies on top of what is internally dubbed "Extended Quickdraw". This is all Apple stuff.
It's not like the info isn't out there folks. Dig it up, before you speak up.
actually knowing him this may be a bit more true than you realize
;)
the freon compressor for instance
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Apple's GUI is AFAIK very proprietary, but is not just a rehash of the old Mac UI (in terms of the code, etc). But Carmack is working on X for it, and it already has a terminal if you can deal with that.
'course the most recent thing i have is MacOS X Server 1.0 and I never used it much, so someone else may have more info on this than I do.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Just found this over on Linuxtoday... AOL has finally announced "internet appliances" based on, of course, Linux. I think we just saw a burp in the Linux userbase of about 2-3 million people within a year...
~luge
P.S. http://www.wideopennews.com/story/707.ht ml for the good, bad, whatever news...
IAAL,BIANLY
What, you mean an OS like Linux? The information is out there and has been out there for anyone who cares to work at it. For Linux/BSD, that means lots of people in their spare time. Considering how much income Be is making (read: not much) they don't have spare time, or spare engineers, to mess with testing and playing and fiddling until things are just right. That's all that's stopping them- it's not like there is some kind of secret, impossible to figure code inside Darwin. Be just doesn't feel it's profitable to waste their time with it anymore. Moral: don't hold your breath for Be to be on anything except Intel (and whatever BeIA runs on) anytime soon.
~lufe
IAAL,BIANLY
ChristTrekker wrote:
Why not go ahead and partition the drive on your G3? If it is a New World architecture Mac (Blue and White G3 and newer), then the Darwin binary installer will even install into a partition for you (don't need to wipe a drive).
A new/old AMD box is going to cost more time/effort than partitioning your G3.
AppleWorks 6 is a Carbon app. If you have DP3, try running AppleWorks 6 and see what you get.
<P>Of course, the merits of AppleWorks 6 is debatable... I don't use it much, but it appears that there are a number of ClarisWorks and AppleWorks 5 users that are not too happy with it. Probably a point release will help quite a bit.
<P>Anyways, there is at least one "works" type suite available for Mac OS X on the ship date. I would bet that Apple is working on Carbonizing all their various non-Carbon applications (iMovie, Final Cut Pro). The AppleShare IP and Mac OS X Server functionality will probably also be ported, but most that of that will be to the BSD API's. The admin apps will probably be a mix of Carbon/Cocoa and web based stuff.
<P>Various heavy weight 3rd parties in the Mac space have already publically committed to some Carbon ports at least. A whole parade of them were on stage at the last MacWorld Expo in January - Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft, id Software, Quark, etc. Adobe actually showed a preliminary Carbon port of one of their apps (Photoshop or Illustrator) on stage at function last year.
<P>By the end of this year, many people won't need to fire up the Classic environment except for games (whose pressure to port to Carbon seems to be less).
Someone should probably go and see what the goals of the HURD is before they try and make that claim. HURD is also a MACH kernel. A GNUMACH Kernel. It is capable of running something called a server that acts like Unix. Servers could potentially be written under this architecture that look like windows also. The kewl thing is they can run simultaneously and two users running simultaneously can both tweak their OS without affecting the other. They also are implementing some interesting things called translators which I am not familiar with at all. Really people, do some research before you submit. I don't care if you are an Anonymous Coward. Oh yeah and it isn't what the HURD wanted to be. It is what the HURD IS and what it WILL BE!!! Keep an eye on that OS. Leimy
From what I've read the existence of an IA32 version is simply a cross-compiled set of the source. I do not think that this even boots yet. Anyways, the only machines that it seems to work on are the OldWorld G3's and NewWorld G3 and G4 systems from Apple. Not as if it matters, when I tried to download it I got an internal server error.
--
Gabriel Ricard
Linux Fanatic
Gabriel Ricard
As much as I use and enjoy Linux, I still don't think of it as "mainstream." When one or more major PC makers start offering it as an option on desktop machines (as opposed to special-order servers that you can't find on their web stores), and perhaps mentioning that option in their ads, the last hurdle will finally be cleared.
Then again, does calling Linux "mainstream" make it a more valid choice than it is already?
-- Dirt Road
Improvise - Adapt - Overcome (unofficial USMC motto)
And the obvious answer is "why didn't you read the page that was linked?". It states there that they are providing it for Intel and Macintosh hardware.
RTFL!
that's supposed to be *R*MS.. and it really was a typo. i have the deepest respect for the work Mr. Stallman has done, and consider his stand on total freedom to be an important part of the ongoing debate about the accessibility of source code. i was not trying to stick my tongue out at him, there.
So, if I download Darwin (or shell out the $20 for the CD) does that mean I get all the install tools (ie bootdisk) and can install it? Are there things in the core that make it not work as a stand-alone system? Why use Darwin when you can just get Mach and BSD, anyway?
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
400K for Be Inc.?
In the U.S. 400K would equate to 400,000 dollars. Does 400K in other countries, like the UK, mean the same thing as 400 million in US lingo?
There is another side of the coin. Many of the kids who did not understand that Macs were not just those annoying slow toys that dealt with at school, administrators who knew even less about the situation and parents bitching on behalf of their kids moved schools away from Macs.
I always liked the things. The interfaces were very newbie proof and you could be further locked down if needed via software. They gave kids a wonderful easy to use way to explore computers. To this day, I love the Mac interface. It is far more intuitive than windoze or even most Linux interfaces right out of the box. Most folks using the latest *nix can toy the interface to do anything they want but Linux wants that desktop then we need to figure out how to go beyond making an interface as good as windoze or even Macs but something better.
I hope that some the Darwin movement will lead to user interface code on a large scale being released so that the free OS movement can see how to move the user's interface with their computer to the next level.
ACK
No current Mac has a ROM in hardware. They all use a ROM file (which as we all know is not really a ROM at all). Ever since the United Motherboard Architecture (UMA) was put into production Apple has done away from hardware ROMs.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Yes, this is going to be a tough transition, not only for the admins, but also the Mac users that support themselves (most corporate IS departments refuse support to Macs.)
These folks have 16 years of inbred training that they should never have to edit a configuraiton file, that everything can be done by the GUI, and that most problems can be solved by deleting your prefs file and rebooting. You already see posts on the Mac boards about OS X -- "How come I can't arrange my folders the way I want" and "Where's the Extension Manager?". It's a combination of very high expectations and complete ignorance of what a 'modern' operating system looks like.
Either Apple has done a perfect job GUI-ifing Unix, or people aren't going to be happy. I can already hear the cries of "(gasp) That sounds like something you would have to do on Windows!".
One light at the end of the tunnel is that apparently OS X will ship without the BSD command environment installed by default. That will put some serious pressure on Apple and 3rd parties to ship Macintosh applications, not unix applications.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
They did get the Mac running on x86. Note however, that this was more a test of their 68K emulator technology than a real platform consideration. (And when PPC finally shipped, the OS was running 90% under emulation.)
They were looking at IBM, Sun Sparc, MIPS, and so on as options for their new processor. The theory was that if ran on a (ugg) PC, it will run on anything.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
And this is no different in the X86 vs mac world
It is different. 10 years ago Macs were twice as expensive as PCs and the hardware was much, much better. This has extended their life by quite a bit. I've used Quadra 950s. I've used the fanciest 486 server that Compaq ever made. Given the choice, I'd take the Quadra in an instant.
(And as for a generic 486 clone -- totally useless except as a DOS machine, a novell print server or some masochist's linux box. 16MB Max, you'll never find a hard drive that will work, 9600bps serial, cheezy VGA video. Ugh.)
Note that Apple hasn't made superior hardware for quite some time. Their modern boxes are pretty much the same thing as modern PCs, and probably will have the same lifespans.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I remember an old Wired article. Gasse personally shot down the OS licencing proposals. He also bewilderingly insisted that Macs would have proprietary networking and would not interoperate with other systems. (He wanted the vendors to run Apple protocols. When Novell released their buggy MACFILE.NLM, the server crashes were the single greatest thing booting Macs out of corporations.) IIRC, Gasse even quashed a proposal where Apple was going to buy Sun Micro (don't even think about their current market valuations, and the fact that Apple *still* doesn't have a modern OS!)
The only thing that Gasse is remembered fondly for is his OPENMAC licence plate, meaning he was pushing the move to make an expandable system with slots and such. Of course, that came at a price. As you mentioned, $10,000, and the abandonment of the original vision of the Mac as a consumer toaster, a computer for everyone.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It seems that the business plan of Be from day 1 was to get bought by Apple. PowerPC-based OS, single user, ran on Macs, secret Mac-like UI mode, and so on. The fact that they failed at this task kinda makes you wonder about their sanity.
Meanwhile, NeXT was sitting there with what was arguably the greatest end user OS of all time, and they were EOLing it because basically nobody wanted it. Deal of the century for Apple -- I wonder why someone else didn't grab them first -- maybe the OS/2 debacle scared them off.
I have a lot of respect for BeOS technically. As for Gasse, however, I've never heard anything really positive about him. While Jobs isn't exactly the greatest in the 'openness' department, Gasse was the single-handed mastermind behind the closed, proprietary Mac of the late 1980s.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
...and Apple makes what hardware that would run the IA32 version of Darwin 1.0?
jhw
MKLinux runs on MACH 3.0. It would be cool to run MacOS X and MKLinux CONCURRENTLY on the same box. They would both just be MACH server processes
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
No speech recognition? You nuckin' futz?
Speech recognition premiered with the Quadra 660AV and 840AV, if I remember correctly, and will run on any Power Mac - Not just new stuff. Get the facts straight, before you start saying an old mac is good for nothing.
That not withstanding, I see your side. I have the honor of using a PM 6100/60 for some minor stuff at work, and let me tell you, I run for the nearest newer machine whenever I get find the need to use Netscape. Still, the 6100 is servicable. I can do anything on it, and I'm running MacOS 8.6 on it. (I may run 9 soon...just haven't upgraded.) It's functional but slow, runs all the latest apps. It is also 6 years old. Can you say that most any PC is still functional?
(On another tangent, 6100s make great little DNS boxes and small FTP servers, as long as you are willing to play with mkLinux. Small, built-in ethernet, and very reliable hardware. We have one on active duty as a secondary DNS at work, and would possible make it primary if we had the time to transfer the DNS records from the primary machine. This may get changed when we move to BIND 8.)
-Smitty
± 29 dB
>> Im mean in comparion with x86 PPC is really good,
>You mean more expensive for less performance?
No, as in more performance, cleaner architecture.
>>Easly scaleable with unix, so you can have multi cpu's.
>Actually I don't think it supports multiple processors. (yet?)
Does, there just isn't really the hardware to do it now. The software is there.
>x86 systems are still vastly cheaper though, so you'll have to find someone willing to make PPC boards that people will actually buy.
Cheaper, but not by as huge a margin as you think. There is also progress on the 3rd-party-hardware front since IBM mad a freely usable reference design. Don't have a link, but a company in Texas is working on non-Mac PPC boards.
>> Well given the was OSX is, it may be just as easy to run OSX on top, and have a vm or something
>> to run linux under it
>This is actually pretty easy to do on a PPC. See http://www.maconlinux.com/
Easy for a trained Linux user, yes. Easy for an *average* user, no. Hell, it took me quite a while, and I am not exectly the typical end user. OS X, on the other hand, will be much easier to configure for legacy Mac OS support.
-Smitty
± 29 dB
It IS worth it. I usually browse at 2+, so I appreciate it when people shove First Post under the radar.
Sorry, my brain's not working right now.
It's useful for people who browse at 1 or 0
For all your MacOS X application needs the best place to find them now is at www.stepwise.com 's "SoftTrak" site.
It is mostly Yellow Box/Cocoa software ported from OpenStep, Next and xBSDs, but there is a lot of useful stuff. Not all has been updated to support DP3 though... only MacOS X Server.
OmniWeb is now DP3 compatible.
I don't think apps will be too much of a problem. I think that within 2 months of it's release, most of the Mac shareware will be Carbon-compliant (many popular ones, like the Anarchie FTP client and Graphic Converter already are). I'm not sure about the commercial software. I'm sure Apple will want to have one or two of the big boys (Adobe, Macromedia, Quark, MS etc.) showing off MacOS X software when it is released at MWNY in July. But the immense scale of those programs might prevent that.
Adobe hasn't updated Photoshop for a while, so maybe they are trying to make PS 6.0 carbon-compliant, who knows.
>Be was too greedy
Correction: Be was not too greedy. The real story, if you had been paying attention, was that in buying NeXT Apple also wound up with Steve Jobs again - their "only hope" for a miraculous cure to their disastrous financial/market condition.
Be didn't price themselves out of the market; Apple simply wanted something that Be couldn't give them: Steve Jobs.
We're still using 68030 macs on up to new G4's here at my school. The largest Mac labs are all 6100 w/G3 upgrades. These machines came out in '94. As long as the machines hold out, they won't give me any more money to upgrade. In a way, it kinda' sucks. We get about 100 new pc's a year but less than 20 new Macs. It's used Macs the rest of the time. They just came out with upgrade cards for LC's (33MHz '040's). Might get some of those and the Project Appleseed clustering software to build a small cluster of pizza boxes. G
I drank what? -- Socrates
Reading this comment and other comments from Linux zealots in this threads, I'm beginning to develop a deep aversion against the Open Source movement. Why should anyone bother with jerks like you? What do you have to offer anyway? Linux has really become a hideout for sociopaths and social rejects. If the Linux community ever wants to gain mainstream support, they'll have to get rid of assholes like you first.
"The core of Mac OS X is the only mainstream operating system following an open source model,"
said Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.
Huh???
"Insightful?" Bah.
mstone covered this nicely above, but here it is again:
./ers should not expect Apple to cast its crown jewels before swine. You might as well ask Intel to hand you a silver platter laden with all of its R&D, together with IP rights, to the Pentium and Celeron product lines. Right, they'd be happy to. All the business they've done since the 4004 was just for kicks, anyway. Who'd want to be the leading producer of microprocessors? Shame on them for protecting that franchise. Ad nauseam.
If your issue is "Open source standards" here's a clue, QT is just as closed source.
QuickTime's file format and its streaming protocol are open.
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This space unintentionally left unblank.
right on! and why is it that anytime a software is mentioned on slashdot, it is followed by open source it? netscape/mozilla is a totally failure if you ask me, look how much ass IE kicks, closed source from our number one ass kicking company Microsoft, and the open source project couldn't catch up.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
Nope, you are wrong! That is not the downside of BSD freedom, but the positive of it, if not apple might not have done this. think of it.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
What does the operating system have to do with Quicktime?
QuickTime is an integral part of the Apple software architecture. Unlike Microsoft however, Apple didn't intergrate QuickTime into the OS in order to cut out competitors. When QuickTime came out, there really weren't competitors to speak of.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Presumably the BSD layer will allow BSD-compatible applications (apache, etc.) to compile and run, and the Mac OS emulation layer similar capabilities for Mac OS software.
The only major problem I see is vendors (e.g. Adobe, Microsoft) not embracing the new OS X-native libraries and instead staying with the lower performance Mac OS emulation layer. Reasons for this might be the cost of retraining developers, or wanting to migrate folks to Windows in the case of Microsoft, which is quite clear to me in light of their current offerings for Mac OS.
Standard Mixed model network according to Corporate manifesto:
Servers: Microsoft Windows 2000
Clients: Microsoft Windows 95/98
Handhelds: Microsoft Windows CE
Board Games: Microsoft Monopoly
No. Linux isn't really mainstream. Mac OS is the only OS apart from Windows * that have been close at the 10% marketshare. And that's what Mac OS X is going to take over from.
;)
Now the question is if it will sell
That's the whole point about the Classic and Carbon environments. Classic will run old apps with no change. And Carbon runs old apps recompiled and slightly modified to run in it. And most developers committed to the Carbon path have promised releases around the time Mac OS X is released.
But look at www.stepwise.com for a db of apps for Mac OS X. There's at least a webbrowser (OmniWeb 4)
Excellent... thanks. I had checked out OmniGroups site and didn't see any OS X screen shots with their web browser.
I just found out that the BitchX irc client has a build available for Mac OS X as well.
Error is discipline through which we advance. -- William Ellery Channing
I have DR3 or OS X. I have installed on an iMac actually... but I am wondering about the availability of applications for this OS. Does anyone even know of a web browser than runs on it? If more applications dont become available soon it's going to kill this OS early on...
Error is discipline through which we advance. -- William Ellery Channing
Yes, it runs on x86 and PowerPC hardware.
Read the press release.
Actually this reaction caused only two things, the rest are secondary. First Carbon was invented. For those who don't know Carbon is a library that sits on top of Darwin to implement nearly all the recent MacOS API's - very similar to WINE. The second action was a delay in release due to creating/adding/debugging Carbon. Everything else; new mach kernel, new display engine, etc are incremental improvements that would have occurred anyways.
The primary reason for the new display engine was cost. With DisplayPS they were paying a license fee to Adobe for every copy of OS X. As a result they created the new display system and blazed the trail into vector based displays.
Exactly! Somebody moderate this up above all the BSD Devil vs Linux penguin crap...
No you see, today is minus 2 day. He is right...
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
You can remove QT from your system with out screwing up your Mac. You will be able to use most Applications. The point is that Quicktime, when installed, is very tight with the MacOS. Just installing the MacOS is like having half of Quicktime already installed with out running the Install QuickTime installer.
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
MacOS itself (at least the current Classic) will run without Quicktime. It's that a lot of graphics apps (and games like Myst, Crystal Key, and Riven) use Quicktime for some or all of their functionality. I stripeed Quicktime from my Filemaker Pro server under the (if the server doesn't need it it goes) motif and it doesn't notice the difference.
And it's not like the Microsoft saw, Apple's Quicktime does include a slew of codecs like Sorensen, that are paid liceneses from outside companies. There're even Amiga Quicktime players, however there usefulness is extremely limited as they do not include the licensed codecs.
I found this in the Darwin wish list.
Work on the X11 port
The XFree86 source is in the Darwin repository. John Carmack got it running on Mac OS X Server. It needs to be made to work using IOKit, and we need a port based on the newer 4.0 release of XFree86. This will give Darwin a windowing system and increase useability. It will also be useful to get the X server running inside of Quartz, so that X apps can run on Mac OS X.
if that happens i'm moving back to macs.
And the "_core_ of the Mac OS X" is mainstream? Forgetting for a moment that Mac OS X or even its v1.0 release date haven't been actually announced yet.
That's some serious mainstream but only inside Apple's own private sand box (where RDF levels are often very hazardous to sanity).
So, even if we would mercifully consider "the core of Mac OS X" having anything to do with Apple's 5% (4% in 1998) market share on the desktop (IDG)- which is a "WHOLE LOT MORE" than Linux' 17% on servers (source?) - you forgot to add Linux' 4% desktop market share (IDG; 0.4% in 1998) into the equation.
Dear Leader Jobs is almost done "milking Mac OS for all it's worth" so now it must be time to increase the intensity in milking the good name of Open Source.
APPLE IS THE UNDISPUTED LEADER IN OPEN SOURCE is not much different from APPLE INVENTED OPEN SOURCE; both claims are equally true but only to persons believing in Apple.
Someone needs to swing a hammer at that QuickTime screen you've all been watching...
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
You also leave out MACH is 4.2BSD based. It came from BSD, and a lot of it returned to BSD. (Excuse the late reply, just checked for replies today)
-bugg
It's also based on Mach, which is cousins (second?) with FreeBSD. Or is Mach's FreeBSD's uncle? No, cousions seem right as Mach's is BSD's son. Semantics, bah! Anyhow, so this _does_ make Darwin kinda incestfull..
-bugg
They've been hiring people like you to do work for them that they can acquire and have the rights to, able to revoke at any time. I'd say you were a sucker, personally. Get involved in a real project.
what an inept, obtuse, and absurd comment.
Not entirely true that G3's are the only machines supported for Darwin 1.0, the 604e machines like the 8500/9500's will work as well and are included in the list on Apple's site.
DB
Steve Jobs has declared that Cocoa is good therefore there is going to be a huge push to get everything written in Cocoa before Classic disappears (probably on Mac OS XI) and Carbon disappears (probably Mac OS XII).
Apple has moved developers and its users like this for many years. Students of OS history should look at the differences introduced in Systems 6, 7, and 8 for practical primers. The 680x0 > PPC transition, ADB > USB and dropping the floppy are demonstrations that hardware gets moved in similar ways.
Frankly, when done right, this is *a good thing* and Apple has been doing it right for the most part. After all, who really wants to deal with IRQs if plug and play works flawlessly? When Apple makes it flawless it wins and retains its fanatical followers.
As for no classic environment for OSX for Intel, I wouldn't count that out either. Certainly Connectix could emulate PPC as easily as they emulate x86, the big question remains, is Steve Jobs is paying them to do so?
DB
The GUI is neither based on X nor is it particularly proprietary (being an implementation of PDF). Apple, for cost reasons, didn't want to license Adobe's visual postscript so they rewrote the PDF open standard to (my term) visual PDF.
If you load the BSD 4.4 compatibility layer (it's an optional load on the install CD), you should be able to run any BSD apps and possibly Linux apps as well.
DB
You may be able to get that $30k Power4 Mac. It just might come with an IBM label though.
There has been a little bit of speculation in the press that IBM is going to migrate out of AIX and into Darwin/OSX because it would make more sense to do that rather than update AIX to take advantage of Altivec. Who knows?
DB
Microsoft exports COM to macs via Office and IE (take a look at your system folder if you have a mac with these products) while Apple exports SOM to windows boxen via Quicktime. It's two sides of the same coin and each is trying to make it easier to develop using their API model.
DB
CompUSA carries macs today, Sears does as well, Circuit City probably will start RSN. I doubt that they are going to stop selling these machines because they are preloaded with OS X.
DB
If IBM offers OSX as a replacement for AIX, there's a clone arrangement that would have absolutely no overlap.
It would also get rid of the "macs are toys" BS that keeps floating up every once in awhile
DB
It's being done already. IBM released PPC board designs to the market, license free and there are third party people making PPC based computers as we speak. They should run Darwin, they may run OSX and they definetly run LinuxPPC. The days of hardware roms blocking cloning are pretty much over.
DB
That would be the last major Mac operating system revision before the current one.
DB
I believe QuickTime is a much bigger part of Mac OS than IE is a part of Windows. I've heard a few Mac OS programmers remark that when they first saw QuickTime for Windows they were amazed at the amount of the Mac OS Toolbox that was there in order to implement it.
... they use it to display or import different types of media.
Lots and lots of applications require QuickTime to run
Drop the X off ... Mac OS 10 will replace Mac OS 9 (just like 9 did 8), so Darwin 1.0 is the core of Mac OS, which is definitely a mainstream operating system. This is not a new OS for servers or sysadmins; this is the new version of Mac OS, aimed squarely at consumers.
No, Mac users definitely use their computers for years longer than people typically use their Intel PC's. I'm constantly amazed at all the people I encounter with beige machines, and the iMac is almost two years old. Not just early G3's, either. Plenty of people are running Mac OS 8.6 or 9.0 on first generation PowerPC's that they bought in 1996 when 16MB of RAM was extravagant. I have a 1994 PowerBook running Mac OS 7.6 that surfs the Web and hooks up to our network fine, and it's got a 68000 CPU. It's got Word 5.1 and Netscape 4 on it and it's really quite a servicable machine.
Mac OS 9 will be replaced by Mac OS X (10) this year. This is just a new version of Mac OS, and Mac OS is certainly a mainstream operating system.
This is very obviously the OS for the iMac, which is as mainstream a computing device as you're going to find.
It very well may be (I don't have numbers, so I won't pull any out of the air).
:), wrapping up some ($$$) nice maintenance contracts, upgrade plans, hardware upgrades, etc.
But I don't think the typical "desktop consumer" will care a great deal if his Operating System has some BSD core, etc. Server market also means dealing less with individual lusers (no offense
Large companies, once they choose an architecture to go with, oft' like to throw money a bit more readily than the typical desktop consumer who just wants to check his mail, play games, browse the WWW, etc. Desktop users probably not going to be as impressed by "robust networking features for making it a great server arch", etc.
My $0.02 (plus tax)
brian is at entropy dot net
We see the little Mozilla pic every other day but anytime there is a BSD story, slashdot won't use Chuck as the picture. Even though this is a more Apple area I just thought I should bring this some attention it deserves. Daemon News
i'm sorry but i have to say it.
"think different", although it is a sentence fragment, is just as grammatically correct as saying "think blue" or "think victory."
ya, it's marketing speak but it's an example of really good marketing speak.
god that was a great ad campaign.
it isn't a rumor, sheesh, it's done it's released, man....
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
>Correction: Be was not too greedy.
Correction: for the money that Be wanted, for Apple to get an OS that *NO* printing and was not mature, Be *DID* want too much money.
>was that in buying NeXT Apple also wound up with Steve Jobs again
Correction: Look back into the commentary of the time. Stewart Alsop had said that the Next Purchase did *NOT* include Jobs (as Steve said he wanted little to do with Apple when the whole buyout thing started)
Would Gil have worked to hire Jobs if he thought Jobs would put him out as CEO?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Again, you are sighting the PAST....Apple's model has changed.
I have a 486 slc based laptop that ran DOS when it was bought, still runs DOS and the accounting program. Just as servicable as the day it was aquired.
And the Pentium 90 still runs FreeBSD. From 2.X to 3.4, just as servicable. Now, it it was Microsoft Windows, this would not be the case. So, don't confuse the hardware with the software...
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
>You nuckin' futz?
/.? You can do that with dragon dictate.
No. Have you actually used Dragon dictate? The 'speech' on a Mac in the timeframe you state was a joke, a parlor trick to show off. Could you use it to dictate this post to
>Can you say that most any PC is still functional?
You bet. See my post about a 286 and 386 boxes still in use.
But remember, even you state:
>I run for the nearest newer machine whenever I get find the need to use Netscape. Still, the 6100 is servicable. I can do anything on it,
On the one hand, you can do anything on it, yet you run for other machines....it either is fully serviceable or it isn't.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Again, your example is the PAST wrt the 486/Quadra.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Err this page http://www.apple.com/macosx/inside.html points out how it has a code base with FreeBSD. Fred took code from net and open BSD however.
The reaction for the 'linux bigots' is LESS interesting than the reaction from the Mac OS bigots. These are the SAME people who, when you would mention how Unix had both Mac OS AND Windows beat WRT multi-processing and stability (note the Apple page... Welcome to the Brave New World of Crash-Resistant Computing), they would slam Unix even harder than Windows. As Apple comes closer to making Unix the default OS, the "Mac OS bigots" have to come to terms with Mac OS now being what they loathed....Unix!
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
>Mac users typically use their systems for a 2-3 years longer than Windows users do
A myth. At least today it is a myth. Apple has moved thier sales model to a 'forced churn' just like the PC makers.
What you say USED to be true...but not anymore under Jobs.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Wow. Didn't know Jobs was getting THIS wacked out.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
*smile*
Tis Ok....I won't have to set Trish on ya to straighten ya out.....
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
>Could you please explain this?
Sure.
1997 bought mac can't run speech rec., or Mac OS X.
2000-1997 = 3 year old mac is useless with new OS X and voice to text. Yes it still runs other software....but so does the 166 mhz X86 that can't run latest OS/voice rec.
Remember too: Rhapsody (uname -a on mac os x) was to run on any mac sold in 1997 by apple. There is no reason to have Mac OS X run on only G3's or better other than to force hardware upgrades. The 6 month upgrades will drive software makers to use the higher speed boxes (just like in the PC world). So if you want that hi-frame rate in quake, you gotta buy that new box. And, as more makers of code do G3 or Altavec, the old PPC boxes will be left in the dust.
>The 1990-era Macintoshes in our office work just great for the desktop publishing tasks they've been doing for 10 years now. No problems printing to the newest postscript printer, either.
Ok, so that is your outerbound.
Here are mine:
A masonic lodge has a 386 with windows 3.11 and Pagemaker. New printer there...and that system works fine.
A 286 that drives a ROM burner/chip tester.
Face it, if the software doesn't change, the old machines will continue to work fine. So to use unchanging software as the basis of a 2-3 year extra life claim is bogus.
I have 386's and 486's in service still as print servers. Hell, a 286 is still a print server.
Old machines are as useful as you want to make them. And this is no different in the X86 vs mac world.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
There is another important reason Apple will not Open Source OSX, they really couldn't even if they want to. OS X is full of technologies that are liscensed by Apple, and in order to open source them, the other compaines would have to agree, which is not that likely, this was I believe the original problem with FreeBSD (AT&T owned technologies?) and with Solaris as well, and its not an effort Apple is going to make. For example Quicktime uses the Soreson codec, which Apple doesn't own. Quartz uses PDF, ect.
Huh? Apple is open about its hardware? Ok, then develop and market a Mac clone box and call me back in the case that Apple doesn't file a suit against you within a month. =)
MOO, I AM THE PUBLIC SOURCE LICENSE STREAMING QUICKTIME SERVER
Here are tasty lines from the page:
What is the Darwin Streaming Server? Darwin Streaming Server is server technology which allows you to send streaming QuickTime data to clients across the Internet using the industry standard RTP and RTSP protocols. It is based on the same code as Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server.
What is the RTP Proxy? The RTP proxy allows organizations to bring multiple incoming QuickTime streams through a firewall.
$var = <STDIN>
$var =~ s/\\$//;
this is slashchomp
I've been wanting to set up a *n*x box at home for some time. I've been looking at all the alternatives: NetBSD or mkLinux on my old Centris, partitioning the drive on my G3, finding/building an AMD box for cheap. So far they're all too expensive or I'm lacking time, or both. I think it would be great to work with Darwin as soon as I have an extra PPC lying around...ha! like that would happen anytime soon. I'm just out of school and have too much debt. :P In any case, I have too many other interests to devote the time to porting drivers and apps.
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I think there are many people who are wanting to use Darwin, but don't right now because the workload at this time would be too heavy. How many people were using Linux in '92? Most of them were probably people that could actually assist in development. Once it got to a "useable" form, more people jumped on. I think the same will happen with Darwin.
Posted with Netscape 6 PR1!
Constitutionally Correct
Nope, got a beige G3. And I want to be able to have the *n*x box and the Mac box running at the same time, to experiment with networking also. Getting *n*x simply running isn't much of an accomplishment. I want to be able to do something once it's up. Even if it's nothing more than being able to share files between the two. (Gotta start somewhere.)
Constitutionally Correct
However, if Ted Turner or Imelda Marcos or the Sultan of Brunei had gone up to Marc Andreesen and said "here's a billion dollars, go beat MSIE", things would be different -- it's all about a level playing field.
IE vs NN isn't about open vs closed, it's about a big company spending a whole lot of $$$ to drive a smaller company out of business. In the game of life, money is trump.
The previous poster was definately the dweeb (not stme, the other guy, whose name I don't feel like finding right now). That's really interesting, and I wonder how DP3 responds to that script. I'm sorry for my inexperience, but If I wanted to try that out in OSX DP3, how do I go about it? Do I just write out that script in the tc shell? I'll see what disasterous consequences it has on Apple's latest seed . . .
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Simple X servers already exist for the MacOS such as the free MI/X,as well as things like White Pine/PowerLAN's eXodus. These would either run under the classic MacOS emulation if they don't get ported to MacOS X's native environment. MI/X is pretty poor, but eXodus works well -- I use it to run X apps on my PowerBook.
It's not like X servers don't exist for the Mac or anything. :)
--srj/mmv
here's a clue for you: QuickTime is an open standard. Always has been, and I don't see that changing in the immediate future. The Sorenson codec is proprietary, true, but you can always use an open codec with your QuickTime server.
--
This Linux thing is a mainstream operating system. I'm serious ... really.
====
Mac OS (I think... don't quote me on this) 6 to run on Intel chips...
I remember having heard that when Apple and IBM got together for chips, they spun off several projects: Taligent, Pink, and one other that I can't remember for the life of me. Anyway, they did indeed get full Mac OS 7 to run on Intel x86 hardware, as part of the Taligent project. I wish I could find my source for this...
This was also around the same time that Apple's "Cognac" project was starting; this was the one that got the Macintosh to run on PowerPC hardware. I suppose one can assume that had PowerPC not turned out to Apple's liking (or been unusable) they would've gone to Intel.
So, yeah, anyway, it seems to be a case of Apple not wanting to make an Intel version rather than not being able to.
(Off topic...)
Apple's ego is back (heck, they've droped the "Computer" from their name)
Hmmm...been reading too much Mac OS Rumors? :-) This never did indeed happen. If you look at the small print at the bottom of apple.com it still says "Apple Computer, Inc." and that's still their official name.
Regards, Chas.
I realize that the OS may come with apps that use Quicktime, and that it might be included as a standard library...but why does anyone need it to run the OS?
I don't know MacOS as well as I'd like to, so forgive me if I'm asking a stupid question, but it seems to me to be like Bill Gates saying "we can't open source Windows 98 because Internet Explorer has licensed technology that we can't distribute!"
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Really? That doesn't seem like a good thing...
I mean, I realize lots of applications may use it's display features, but I still think it's along the same vein as Microsoft claiming Windows won't work without IE. Will MacOS really not work without Quicktime? Some applications, maybe, but the OS won't run without it? That seems pretty bad to me.
----------
Stupid sexy Flanders.
When will Apple release Quicktime in a format that allows cross-platform viewing of QuickTime 4 movies?
Are there any formats other then Open Source that would allow this to occur?
You've summed up my feelings about the situation exactly.
When Scully told Jobs that there was no way he would sell the first Mac for $1299, he added that in a few years, they would be charging $10,000 per Mac!
And they did......and paid for it dearly. Guess who was backing up Scully all the way?
Our old friend Jean Louis.
The story goes he later tipped off Scully that Jobs was (naturally) planning to kick him out. Scully turned the tables on him and organized boardroom coup. Jobs left, made a machine that was everything the Mac should have been and sold it for $10,000. While Scully and his crew were putting out OK boxes for the same price and turning down clone offers from Andy Grove, back when it actually would have worked.
Later, when Jobs came back, after years of shoddy products, he directed Apple to put out a Mac that was considered by many to be a perfect homage to the first one in form and spirit. The price.....$1299.
Be didn't price themselves out of the market; Apple simply wanted something that Be couldn't give them: Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was a nice extra, but in all reality, Be was asking for far too much. The wanted hundreds of millions of $$$, plus a hefty helping of Apple stock. All this for a OS that hadn't seen the light of day, and was constantly coming out Real Soon Now.
Not so much as a printer driver existed at that point.
Apple paid a comparable amount for NeXT, but it also got a well respected development team (Avie and his crew), a mature and eastablished OS, WebObjects, which generate millions of $$$ in profits to this day. As well as Steve Jobs, who is probably the only reason Apple is still around to ship OS X.
Amelio was great for turning the company around, but he lacked the long term vision to keep it going.
Be shot themselves in the foot with the original offer, not to mention the fact they then demanded MORE money while Jean Louis went around telling people how much he was going to squeeze out of Apple.
Apple said "Fuck You" and went back to making billions in profit while Be is still desprately looking for ways to get out of the red for at least one quarter.
Therefore, they put a hell of a lot of hardware abstraction into Copland. the OS started to shed modern features for compatibity. I believe the second part of the cloning arrangment was based on the assumption that Copland would be around. Which as we all know, it wasn't.
Apple was being killed by the competition, which up to this point, it was financing. It didn't have any way to assure compatibility and was ready to lose everything it had left.
So clones were rightfully "Steved".
If I recall correctly, PDF is a published spec, like IEEE 1394 for example, which can be used somewhat openly.
Rumors have it that the portion of OS X that used to be, or still is based on NExT's OpenStep, was, is and may continue to be upgraded to be cross platform. This should mean that anyone coding in "Cocoa"/OpenStep should compile to any supported hardware, maybe even the Solaris.
Reality states that the portion of OS X that is Mac OS 9 compatible and even the "Carbon" portion will not be cross platform compatible.
What does this mean? Look for newly written software to be able to run on next to any hardware, kinda like well coded Linux apps, but anything out there now won't crossover.
Just my understanding of what I've read on http://MacOsRumors.com
Actually, what you say is not the whole truth. 4.4BSD, the OS from which all other Free- Net- and Open- BSDs are derived, was using Mach VM code. So Mach kernel could easily be considered to be uncle for all modern BSD variants. Unfortunately, none of nephews liked uncle too much. All of them removed poorly integrated Mach code from theis sources in favor of their own implementations (UVM for NetBSD and OpenBSD, no-name VM for FreeBSD)
Ah, but can they? [/devil's advocate]
Speculation is ALL that's available there! MOSR is the red-headed stepchild of Mac websites.
It means that OS X is potentially cross-platform -- as well as offering hope to owners of 604e-base PCI Macs that OS X may support their machines as well -- a number of pre-G3 Powermacs are listed as supported.
There's a fair possibility that Apple might make an Enterprise version of Mac OS X available on x86 or various other platforms. It would make the old Openstep users happy. It would probably only have Cocoa, so they'd have to port the new Finder to Cocoa first -- not that that would be hard. Carbon has endianness-related issues, or so I've heard, so it probably couldn't be run on x86. Classic obviously couldn't be. So other platforms probably wouldn't run the usual Mac apps -- but they could run the awesomeness that is the Cocoa development environment! :D
Set up dual monitors. You can run X on one, MacOS on the other using John Carmack's X port.
I don't know why you say that. Carbon is just a library that translates a subset Mac OS API calls into "Cocoa" API calls. And "Cocoa" is really Openstep which runs on Windows.
If there was a reason for Apple to want to make it easier for developers to create cross platform products, Carbon would be a great way for them to do it. That was the great appeal, to me, about the "Rhapsody" announcment. It pretty much read to me as:
Developers, you can either use awkward development environments (Visual C++) and baroque APIs (Win32) and try to sell to 95% of the desktop market, or you can bring your product to market sooner and use our great, timesaving development environment (Nextstep/Openstep development) and our rich and expressive API (Foundation Kit,Application Kit, etc.) and have a product that will reach 99% of the desktop market.
It was a good stratagy for a platform that was loosing market share in part because of its shrinking list of software and developers. Developers could shorten their development time, and as a side effect Apple got another product that ran on their platform. Of course, I can see why Cocoa was needed. The major mac developers said that they had no interest in rewriting for yellowbox/OSX. That if they were going to throw away their MacOS software, they weren't going to replace it with something else. And the promise of cross-platform compatibility didn't sell them either; they already had their cross-platform solutions worked out.
When the stategy turned from Rhapsody to OSX, the piece that really disturbed me was the dropping the royalty free Intel Yellowbox. The pieces still seem to be there. (Apple is still selling OpenStep for Windows), but the shift seemed only to try to win the favor of past MacOS developers (with Cocoa) rather than future developers (with a royalty free yellowbox)
I thought that there were some decisions against the copyrightability of function definitions. From what I've read, when Whitesmiths created IDRIS, they were worried about copyright infringement on Unix, so they renamed library routines and changed the order of argument lists. But later versions of IDRIS converted to Unix's standard calling conventions. I assumed it was because the issue had been settled elsewhere. (Or was it just because they realized that if Bell Labs wasn't going to sell it, they weren't going to sue over it.)
Is the GUI for this thing based on X-windows, or is it proprietary Apple stuff.
In other words, did they implement the Mac API's on top of X or replace X altogether?
If X is in the mix, then can you run regular unix/linux apps along side the Mac stuff?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
BSD, not FreeBSD. They are cousins, though.
Ok, this is just SIlly, since when is linux and freeBSD NOT mainstream? What needs to happen for these os's to become 'main stream'. The press release was very offensive, and if the engineers at apple 'get it' maybe they should explain it to marketing becouse they 'dont get it' , making false statements, missleading statments, and inventing things is not acceptable in OSS circles. They need to know spreads marketese rumors will only discredit their project in the long run, they are no longer speaking to mindless teachers / graphic artist that were forced in to alegiance with apple, rather people that choose to work/use darwin.
Especially by doing something like:
[1] Put on lots of free lunches for press journalists, send out lots of powermacs to magazines so osX gets lots of rave reviews.
[2] Wait until lots of interest in Macintosh then slash retail prices to "at cost" - sell direct from factory - flood lots and lots of cheap macintoshes into the market.
[3] Bring price back up and be happy.
:wq
Except of course that none of them (except MkLinux) runs on top of Mach though. The day Microsoft creates a Windows running on top of Mach, I'll eat my mousepad.
Now, of course, the problem of running multiple OS personalities on top of a microkernel is one of resource allocation. Deciding on how much the different OS personalities should get of, say memory, is just a minor problem. They probably need to agree upon a protocol for sharing/granting memory to each other. Then there is the problem of device drivers. Who should for instance be be responsible for the disk driver (having multiple disk drivers accessing the same hardware simultaneously simply does not work)? Furthermore, say that Linux is responsible for the disk driver, how can BeOS be allowed to access the disk?
Uhm, come to think of it, this last argument (i.e. device drivers) is not that valid for Mach since it has some in-kernel device drivers. (On the other hand, Mach is not really a modern -kernel, so there you go.) It does however allow user-level device drivers to be implemented, so... Oh well, what do I know. I've never used Mach (except from through Hurd), and much less implemented a device driver. I guess I'll just stop rambling about this and go do something useful.
I guess the obvious question is "will this only run on apple hardware?"
Score:3, Funny
surprising that some of the 7 people who have actually seen seaquest and therefore get the joke are reading slashdot.
wait, no, i guess it isn't very surprising... is it?
-Elendale (Why is this story red? Is it my computer or Slashdot?)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
-Elendale (does his best 'maniacal villain laugh')
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Actually, it was Michael Dell who said that.. Quite a difference
Donate free food here
The threats from Apple were about the unlicensed usage of the Apple logo, not about the Aqua look. You can create as much Aqua look-alikes as you want (in fact, there are already several ones) and you won't get a complaint from anyone. It's just that the Apple logo is trademarked and if Apple doesn't protect it's trademark (even if it's used in a flattering kind of way), it won't be able to do anything if someone "abuses" it later on. The same goes for Linus and the Linux trademark (remember the domain name debate?).
Donate free food here
All modifications done to GPL'd tools have to be released under the GPL, so all those modifications done by Apple are in no way revokable by them. They're not (and cannot) convert those sources to fall under the APSL because people they hired changed them. They're even assigning the copyright on several changes (most notably the changes done to GCC) to the FSF. Grow up & get real...
Donate free food here
AFAIK, there are three kinds of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, and trademarks.
Is the OpenStep API copyrighted? From what I've read, an API (i.e. a set of function signatures) is purely functional and thus cannot be copyrighted. (The documentation for the API is copyrighted, so just write your own.)
Is the OpenStep API patented? APIs are not patentable, but maybe Apple has some patents on algorithms that are required to implement OpenStep.
Is the OpenStep API trademarked? I assume the name "OpenStep" is a trademark of Apple, so don't call your implementation OpenStep. Call it GNUStep. cf. the OpenGL/Mesa issue.
If all of these issues are satisfied, then you don't need any kind of license to implement an API.
No, that wasn't the assumption in my post.
Is there anyone who prefers Darwin to Linux or BSD? Why? It's not a rhetorical question; I'm honestly curious.
Darwin does not have a GUI at all. It's important not to confuse Mac OS X (which uses Quartz) with Darwin.
Darwin doesn't have any GUI and it doesn't support Classic, Carbon, or Cocoa Mac apps.
So what is its benefit over Linux or BSD? I'm still looking...
Of course, porting Carbon would be non-trivial.
Why? It's just a shared library written in C AFAIK. It shouldn't be any trickier than, say, porting Gtk+ from Linux to BSD.
Hmmm... The core of Mac OS X running on Intel machines. Maybe it's time to hit Bill while he's down. - Rake
--
but my R&D "research" has shifted to "development" faster than I expected, and the past few weekends have been monopolized by new engine work.
John, with all the salivae that went to my keyboard when reading this sentence, it became next to unusable, I would thank you to send me a check of 0.001% of the royalties of Quake 3* to compensate the inestimate loss of one of my best friends in life, one with which I share a lot of time.
Cheers,
Julien
*(that I still haven't bought, my 133 :( probably wouldn't love it)
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
First off, many of you don't quite understand that Darwin *is* BSD. What NeXT/Rhapsody/MacOS X really is is a Mach-based BSD (similar in principle to Lites), with the Objective-C runtime developed by NeXT as part of the overall system. Darwin is that BSD system stripped to the basics: no GUI, no high-level APIs -- in other words, a vanilla BSD with some cool tricks up its sleeve.
The biggest problem with Darwin at this point is the almost-but-not-quite opensourceness of the APSL -- you can do what you want freely, but not behind closed doors because Apple wants a cut of your code. I don't think that's a big restriction in practice, but some find it philosophically limiting. Despite that, Apple's to be applauded for taking the free-ride approach to OS development; not only do they (in theory) make off like bandits, they also give their work back.
They're not free of reasons for criticism, however. They aren't making enough public. I want to see the wreckage of Copland put out there. I want to see Quicktime on Linux. Apple is dribbling things out there, but needs to show more of its cards and not worry about OS and service revenue (face it, that market will be shot to hell in two years anyway; why do you think there's a flat price for OS X Server to begin with?)
Darwin, IMHO, occupies a bit of a grey area -- if developers picked it up and ran with it, the BSD community would be that much stronger, and Apple would be able to generate some revenue by porting OS X to hell and back. But the APSL has to change, and Apple needs to put more on the line. Let's see Aqua go open-source. Let's see Apple cut loose on OS 7 through 9 -- the fact is that they won't be needing it anymore when OS X Client comes out, but a hell of a lot of non-G3 users will.
Just thinking...
/Brian
What the fuck? Oh.. I'm a troll now? Is that it? Give me a fucking break. How is that being a troll? If I'm gonna troll like I'm gonna do it with my own respectable user name. Some people shouldn't be given the right to breathe, let alone moderation points...
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
LOL... Yea I was wondering about that... Heh, I Just browser at -1 cause its amusing to see AC posts sometimes.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I don't know where you get your crack, but Mach OS does nothing of the sort.
It does now (well, OS X is a little sketchy yet :) on all platforms for which Apple can justify the investment.
If you have some sound business justification for porting to a not currently supported platform that has escaped the QuickTime team, QuickTime application developers, and the world in general up to this moment, you can send it to me and I can assure you that the appropriate people at Apple will receive it.
If not, well, then it appears to have escaped you that the QuickTime team needs to justify their salaries. "Wouldn't it be neat to watch movies on Linux" is not an acceptable justification.
Note that the file format of a QuickTime movie is publicly and completely documented. To write an API to handle that should be the work of no more than a couple weeks. It is the codecs that are the trick, and most of those are not Apple's intellectual property anyway, you would have to deal with their implementors.
A specific example of said codec would be the QDesign 2 Music codec, which really is the best low-bandwidth music technology out there. I did the first version of QDesign's MVP, so I'm not talking through my hat when I assure you that if QDesign saw a business opportunity in QT for another architecture they would be pushing Apple for it. Another would be the Sorenson Video codec. One of my former subordinates has just been hired there to work on the OS X stuff. Ditto.
So there you go. If you have any good reasons for Apple and codec makers to do this work, I can absolutely guarantee their delivery to the decision makers on the QuickTime team, at QDesign, and at Sorenson.
If not ... quit'cher whining.
Take a closer look. There are subtle advantages to Objective-C over Java that makes the Openstep API much more powerful and flexible than the JDK; this is also why Distributed Objects is much better than RMI: I don't see how you could write something like the NSProxy in Java. It's the forwardInvocation: method, the categories and run-time vs. compile-time type checking that make all the difference. For a masterpiece of ObjectiveC programming, check out the Enterprise Objects Foundation; take a look at the EOFault and give me an ideea of how to implement it in Java - I tried hard but my $0.2 brain won't just cut it.
Now it's quite weird why Sun hasn't implemented all the ObjectiveC goodies in Java, especially since they are coauthors of the Openstep spec. Then we would have a really powerful alternative to C++. But I digress; I think the GNUStep people need help in their quest to build a free alternative to Openstep/Cocoa. It would bring everybody the possibility to use some wonderful programming paradigms that unfortunately have been marginalized for more than 10 years. Ever since I stopped working with the Openstep tools (2 years ago), programming is not as stimulating as it used to be. Whereas I would usually enjoy discovering new stuff in the APIs and the tools, now I just keep cursing: I can't do this, I don't have that.Tuff that Smatters.
I've noticed this too. It's been a few years since I've been out ouf highschool, but the same thing was true between 1996-1998. For some reason the administration decided to buy a load of top-shelf Pentium 166 and 233 systems, decked out with 17" monitors, Windows 95 and Office 95 for use in word processing labs and to run the library's DOS-based card catalog software.
At the same time, they decided to install the very latest (and slooow) version of Office and MiniCAD onto several labs of 6 - 8-year old Macs. Macs that were running just great before, but couldn't handle this new software too well on their 16MHz 68030s and 8 MB of RAM.
Not too mention how an entire lab of 486's running DOS (for an ancient version of TurboPascal) were updated to beyond 16 MB of RAM for no real reason.
I never really understood the hatred for Macintoshes in my old school. Most of the 100+ Macs installed had done their jobs very well for 4 - 10 years with very few problems. Then all of a sudden, they're loaded down with new software with insane requirements, criticized for running slow, and replaced/suplemented with 60+ PCs, at a cost of almost $2200 per seat, half of which are so messed up right now that they won't even boot.
I never understood it, and from what I hear, this isn't too rare.
>A myth. At least today it is a myth. Apple has moved thier sales model to a 'forced churn' just like the PC makers.
Could you please explain this? The only thing I can really think of to support this would be Apple's move away from seral, ADB, and SCSI to USB, Firewire, and ATA/66. There has to come a time to move forward.
What turned Apple's sales model into "forced churn"?? Selling cheaper computers? (The Mac Classic was really the iMac of 1991) Requiring A PowerPC-based computer for the latest OS? (PowerPC-based macs came out in 1994).
I don't understand what your comment is based upon. Please explain it.
The 1990-era Macintoshes in our office work just great for the desktop publishing tasks they've been doing for 10 years now. No problems printing to the newest postscript printer, either. Acccess our OS X Server-based file server thru Appletalk quite well. Sure, we had to put NuBus ethernet cards in the older machines about 5 years ago, and bought some USB to Serial & ADB adapters to use our color calibration equipement on the newer G3s and G4s, but that's about it.
This guy is hilarious.
Mac OS web servers are great for people who want either:
- Maximum security at any cost
- Idiot proof web-serving
Before Apple switched from MacOS web servers from www.apple.com, they were using- get ready-45 Mac OS boxen running specially tuned copies of WebStar.Granted, the Army (see point#1 above)has started using WebStar, but only because they are paranoid that some port-sniffing hacker is gonna give their NT server a black eye. Plus, they've got a reputation for pouring lots of good money after bad for products that sorta work.
I wish they [Apple] were more open with there hardware Open how? What is there about a TI PCI bridge chip, Motorola memory controller, ATI video card, Opti FireWire controller, or USB controller that is not open? You can get the specs from those companies.
I'm tired of the same old (pardon) crap about Apple hardware not being open/standard/whatever. Maybe it was true when a bunch of lazy developers at Be were ticked and didn't feel like figuring out how to use the custom chips on the old G3 logic board, but it sure ain't true today.
Fact: The blue and white G3 and the 'graphite' G4 are built of almost completely commoditized parts. Try walking down an open firmware device tree sometime and looking at the names of the parts there. Unless you want to do really funky things with the soft power, or maybe write a legacy driver or some old piece of hardware, it's pretty simple to write device drivers for those machines.
Ah, numeracy is going all to hell. . . <sigh>
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Kudos to Apple!
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
It already did -- all of OS X "plumbing" did just get released. And more: Darwin includes a significantly beefed up gcc, and -- and this is breathtaking -- Apple's Objective C runtime, and the CoreFoundation frameworks (well, almost all of them).
The rest -- AppKit, Kernel Extension/Driver Development Kit, Quartz, Quicktime (w. native OpenGL), Carbon, the full Java- and Objective C Cocoa frameworks and development tools -- depends quite a lot on having a powerful and versatile micro-architecture. Maybe it'll be there, at some point, and maybe it won't; but even in its current form, Darwin is already way ahead of all the rest. It actually has an architecture, and quality OO-frameworks that deliver.
There are some people who are suspicious of Apple's motive for allowing the existance of Darwin. To that I say it serves in the best interest of Apple and rightly so. They can pick and choose portions of code that would enhance OSX. It is not without cost to Apple, however. They had to release key technologies to opensource, like QT streaming server. Some of you may say that this doesn't really cost Apple anything. Wrong, it costs them profit. After all you form a company to turn a profit. For those of you in the Open Source community who roll your incredulous eyes at Apple's audacity take a look at Redhat. I bet they're interested in turning a profit as well and they are a pillar of the community.
This is an equal exchange of ideas. And it will be good for Apple and the Open Source community. Not just for Linux or FreeBSD. But for the average Joe or Jane out there who are developing their own OS.
So all you zealots (OpenSource and Mac) pipe down and contribute. Ideas, code or support. Not whining.
I love my MacOS and Linux (LinuxPPC) and no one is going to tell me otherwise.
End of rant
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
As I understand it, Darwin is essentially OSX, sans Quartz and the MacOS compatability layer.
Close. Its Mac OS X minus Quartz, Carbon (the Mac OS X API compatibility layer), Classic (the Mac OS 9 emulation software) and Cocoa (the OpenStep API layer).
Finally, could anyone tell me if they know whether or not OSX is OpenStep compliant? ie, when Quicktime for OSX is released, would it be possible to run it under GNUstep?
QuickTime on Mac OS X is built on top of Carbon, not on Darwin or Cocoa, so it won't run in any environment that does not have Carbon. AFAIK, only Mac OS 8, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X will ever have Carbon on them. Carbon is not Open Source and is unlikely to ever be, IMHO.
Sailing over the event horizon
t last I checked, Apple only had ~5% of the desktop share, and their server share is non-existent. What does Apple have that makes their OS mainstream, that Linux doesn't?
Apple currently has about 5% share of new computers sold. That's one useful measure. A more useful measure might be the percentage of installed base. Apple's market share has been (significantly) higher in the past and Mac users typically use their systems for a 2-3 years longer than Windows users do. These two factors combine to give Apple somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the of the installed base of machines in current use.
Sailing over the event horizon
When will Apple release Quicktime in a format that allows cross-platform viewing of QuickTime 4 movies?
Apple already has. QuickTime 4.x runs on Mac OS 7, 8 and 9. It runs on all versions of Windows from 95 thru 2000. It (will soon) run on Mac OS X.
Oh, by "cross-platform", you meant "runs on Linux"? Time to actually say what you mean.
Are there any formats other then Open Source that would allow this to occur?
I guess you are asking whether Apple might release QuickTime as closed binaries on Linux. I'd guess its something they have looked at. Don't forget QuickTime is a massive piece of software. It does much more than just play back video - it has interactivitiy, sprites, QTVR, a full visual effects architecture etc. It runs to several million lines of source code and was the result of thousands of engineer-years of work.
Porting QuickTime to a new platform is a huge undertaking. It took Apple several years with a large team of engineers to get QuickTime onto Windows, and keeping the Mac and Windows versions in sync is itself a lot of work. Porting to yet another platform (Linux) would require a lot of money and expertise. Apple would really need to see a clear reward in order to invest the effort to do this. Some day the equation may come out in favor of QuickTime for Linux, but I suspect it isn't even close yet.
Sailing over the event horizon
Thanks for the support WiseWeasel ;-)
As a follow up:
In principle proofing a system against such things is quite simple: just limit the number of processes on a per user basis (with AIX for example this is possible). If this seems to be not an option - then reserve a few processes for root use only.
These things ought to be configurable...
So maybe that specific system I mentioned in my first post was just poorly configured (however the guys responsible for setting it up in the first place probably just installed it "out of the box") - so my critcism is still valid.
Besides I am too old to get into that OS-war thing anymore - I couldn't care less if a box were running Unix (SysV, BSD, OSF1, anything "compatible" like AIX or Linux), VMS, MVS or (cough!) NT. As long as it delivers it is OK - if it gets in the way of doing business, well... Picture about 200 people thinking that their bonus is at risk just because of a bloody computer fault and all of them think that you are responsible!
No. The above post is right. Amelio bought NeXT at the same price Gassee wanted for Be, which was nowhere near as developed as NeXT. The idea was to get NeXT. Jobs was hired as a consultant. Amelio did not plan on Jobs becoming CEO. It worked out that way, but not by design. It worked that way by boardroom politics. Jobs coming back as iCEO was a good thing (TM), but he was very underhanded in getting that position. Be was overpriced. Gassee wanted 400K for Be Inc. NeXT wanted the same amount. Anyone who looked at the deal, and the comparative merits of the two development teams would have made the same choice.
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
A while back... back in the "sugar water" days of Apple they got Mac OS (I think... don't quote me on this) 6 to run on Intel chips... that was back when they where going to split the company, boxes and software, back when the logo had 6 colours, when no one was making billions off the stock... back when NeXT didn't mean anything to almost anyone... times have changed, Apple's ego is back (heck, they've droped the "Computer" from their name). With ego comes stuff we're not all going to like (can we say QuickTime 4's interface? Gag me please). Ok, I'm getting off topic and I'm forgetting what I wanted to point out. Sorry guys... that's the way I work.
----------
Behold the magic of my logic!!!
I think that the real truth of the matter is that end users themselves want to be mindless fools (or they just are and can't help it). Now that computers are in the hands of the POI's (Plain Old Idiots) they are controling the market. POI's don't care about megahertz (unless they have been misled by Intel) or system architecture or adding graphic cards or running three monitors. Most never even add ram. If Apple never built the Mac to appeal to the POI's, if M$ never came out with Windoze the retail computer market would be much much smaller. Would you like it if you had to know a whole lot about how the combustion engine works to make your car go?
I was under the impression that even the UMA 2 boards had a small amount of on board proprietary rom (512k?) that prevents certain OS developers from supporting the machines.
It seems to me what Apple is doing is putting out some feelers to see if porting X to Intel is worth the effort. There is probably little chance that X will be open sourced but It could be. If they price their boxed precompiled retail version cheap and make the source the only part you can download then they could do it. Probably under a fairly restrictive license, maybe not even technically "open" source. Apple has to do anything it can to get market share. Be's stunt with FreeBe might be a good idea but probabaly not for Apple. They already lose money on the OS (making it up on the hardware), but if they can get more people to pay them a little for the OS and just the OS they could move away from the custom ROMS and to a more open architecture (the ROM is the only part of current Mac's hardware that is really proprietary and the only real impedament to a fully open architecture). It will be interesting to watch and see if IBM's announced CHRP PPC open motherboard spec ever ships as this might be the way to give the geeks like us an open platform to get Darwin running on and try to paste a retail X/Auqa on top.
You going to wwdc John?
While the Mach kernel and BSD personality are neat, the real crown jewels are in Quartz and Cocoa. Otherwise Darwin is just another BSD clone, albeit a BSD on top of a micro-kernel.
I'm a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice, etc.
>It's close but not quite.
That will be news to the OSI . . . see link above
>It has the so-called "termination clause", where Apple can revoke
>all rights under the license under certain conditions.
Those conditions are pretty much "if it becomes illegal to
distribute this software." The GPL has a similar term.
hawk, esq.
I'm not gonna say quartz, cuz I'd probably label the wrong piece . . .
My big question is whether or not I can have both X and mac simultaneously displayed. If I can, I probably want one of these at my new job in the fall. But I absolutely have to have unix and a heavy-duty compiler, and I like my X stuff. They stay. If I can have mac apps too, then a mac becomes possible. If not, there's no point.
Hmm, I hadn't thought of that. Then again, I tried MI/X when I was using a IIci running netbsd primarily as an X terminal.
"poor" doesn't begin to describe it. Xterminals worked fine, but some programs (including netscape) would draw the same horizontal line several times.
But the Xserver as a run of the mill mac program makes a certain amount of sense. I suppose I could customize the rest for the X-y things I like.
OK, I suppose what I really want is X to take, over, but let mac programs run . . .
>I am not sure but I would hazard a guess that the Apple Public Licenses
:) There were complaints about the .)
>is NOT a certified (by OSI) Open Source (TM) licence
Would you like another guess?
initial license, and it was changed, and now meets the DFSG or
whatever those initials are. (unless, of course, you're saying they
haven't paid the organization for the certification. But neither
has any other open source project that I've heard of . .
And "Open Source" is not a trademark. They let the application expire
(and would never have received a valid trademark, anyway).
hawk
I have to agree with this. No real benefits would accrue to anyone through Apple opening its GUI, except perhaps those who want to port it more or less directly to another Operating System. I'm not even convinced that Linux or Windows users would benefit from this.
I firmly believe in open source development for the core functions of an OS or software app, but I'm not convinced that the model works for GUI development. The Mac's user interface has benefited from remaining closed - its consistency is what makes it a joy to use. Of course, leaving the GUI in the hands of a single company is scary - what if Aqua turns out to be a UI nightmare? But at least Apple are strongly motivated towards UI excellence - it's their main selling point.
Open source brings the benefits of peer review to work that the general public cannot evaluate. However, GUI design has always been subject to peer review, in the sense that the general public can evaluate its usability. Therefore I have no problem with its remaining closed, at least in some cases.
The fact that Linux people want Aqua for Linux shows that they accept the value of something developed in a closed source environment. They don't want Aqua in order to extend it, or make it work more efficiently, they just want the advantage of great GUI design for their great operating system.
On the other hand: Apple is probably also going to hold on to Quartz, which is something I would be very interested in seeing released to the open source community. This is an exciting technology that could conceivably benefit greatly from open source development.
Hot on the heels of their successful injunction against GNUSTEP developers and distribution sites, Apple slaps a look-and-feel lawsuit on GNOME and Enlightenment.
The question is whether the function/class names count as a purely functional component or as part of the documentation or intellectual property. Common sense says the former, though AFAIK this hasn't been tested in court.
On the other hand, magic signatures are sometimes copyrighted and used to enforce control of platforms. This is the case with video game console cartridges (for example to develop and market a Nintendo game, you have to put a copyrighted string in the cartridge ROM, and to license this string you have to meet all sorts of onerous demands).
Ok, I didn't believe in a "conspiracy of the trolls" or anything like that until I saw this post and the moderation on it. I mean, it wasn't the brightest post in the world, but it was funny, it was well timed (it's #18 and is redundant?), brough up an arguably important point (lack of respect for Linux), and it's by someone who is clearly deserving of respect (instead of the jealousy he's obviously gotten.) /. won't be able to save itself and truly is destined to be flushed away. That's pretty sad.
I don't even know what else to say about the other implications of an actual organized plan to manipulate moderation- if moderation is actually that broken, then in the long term,
Go ahead, moderate me down. I've got plenty of karma to spare...
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Join our campaign to ban the Use of Darwin at schools.
Help us to stop this hidden campaign to introduce this satanic, evolutionist, darwinian propaganda in the virgin minds of our kids.
We all know that God (tm) is the creator of everything: Kernels, GUIs, Window Managers, OS. He also created the whole Internet, when he sent his own flesh (Al Gore). He created everything in 6 days and he did everything perfect. Our society don't need this kind of crap!!!
Call our troll free number 1-800-GOD and tell us if any kid in your classroom has already downloaded this satanic tool. You can get free Windows CDs, Windows T-Shirts and Microsoft shares.
Ah, I see. I hadn't read it as carefully, but I had read it.
What I don't like about their "license" is that it is so confusing full of exceptions, definitions, etc. Compared to the language in the APSL, the GPL looks downright simple.
Have to admit that I like the APSL a bit better than the Sun Community Source License or whatever it is called. I still don't like (though I forgot to mention it before) that you have to register on the Apple site before you can get the Darwin code from them. I didn't notice anything in the license restricting someone else from posting a copy and allowing others to download it.
I'm a registered Apple Developer. I signed up for the ADC site as a student. I've lost my user id and password, but I still get the email newsletter every week. Maybe, I'll download the Darwin code and give it the once over.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
now, i've never seen anyone say, "if Apple opened their GUI, i'd work to improve the Mac OS."
Meaning you've never heard anyone on a Linux board like Slashdot say that.
The substantial MacOS hacker community has been working to extend the Mac UI since the thing shipped in 1984. There's a giant library of freeware/shareware GUI extensions out there right now -- more and better than the Windows add-ons you might have seen. There's also a group of NeXT developers still around. These folks would *love* to get source access to the GUI, and they probably wouldn't kvetch and moan about it not being under GPL either.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Rather than get involved with a company that clearly doesn't get it, why not help make the closest thing to OpenStep work better? A lot of the Java libraries are designed in the spirit of OpenStep and the Java imaging model is essentially PostScript. What Java needs is more efficient compilers; technically, if Java is compiled natively, there is no reason it should be any slower than Objective-C. Cygnus has made a great start on a native code Java compiler. It needs more help and more free libraries.
(Incidentally, the licensing paragraph in the OpenStep docs has been there for years, and I'm surprised nobody on the GNUstep project bothered to clear this with Apple/NeXT before they got started.)
Granted, it isn't quite as straightforward as Objective-C, since you are forced to define interfaces. I, too, would have preferred these features to be as straightforward in Java as in Objective-C. But you lose some and you win some: on balance, Java has runtime safety and Java's reflection API is more complete and better specified; on balance, I think that's not a bad tradeoff.
Incidentally, there are more dynamic distributed object systems for Java, including Sun's own JavaSpaces, as well as some of the XMLRPC implementations.
Incidentally, both JPython and Bistro give you a very Smalltalk/Objective-C like object model on top of the Java runtime. Bistro just uses reflection, which has significant overhead. JPython actually does a lot of analysis to make some method invocatinos faster. I believe it's possible to do even better and essentially support Smalltalk/Objective-C object semantics completely and portably in Java.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Sun, unlike Apple/NeXT, has publically stated that independent reimplementations of their software and APIs are fine with them (their battle with Microsoft is over trademarks and licensing terms, not the right to clone Java).
By mainstream, he meant consumer not server. Linux is not mainstream by that definition. Neither is FreeBSD. Neither is Windows NT. Neither is Netware.
Your number might be correct about market shares, but the last time i checked, 5% of the desktops is a WHOLE LOT MORE than 17% of servers.
Lest we (there are a couple around here) Mac-o-philes forget, it was the third-part developers like Adobe, Macromedia, et el. who were extremely pissed at Apple over Copland.
For those who don't know, or don't care, Copland was the buzz-word compliant OS8 that Apple spent millions developing, that very few outside people ever saw, and was quickly dumped when Gil took over and bought out NeXT.
I just hope that Apple can force the issue, because as of January 2001, OS X is going to be the only OS Apple makes for their computers!
Ps I've played around with OS X with my G4 and have 2 major complaints: the placement of the close/maximize/hide buttons, and the amount of screen real estate the window dressing takes up. Here's hoping Apple trims it down between now and the release!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Please don't. Nothing has happened yet, just an email that may have no basis in fact. The last thing needed right now is people getting vocal over this. Let's not piss Apple off until it's been decided if this is even an issue to be worried about. Comments like this are only going to help cause a problem when there might not even be one.
Companies are made of people. There are some folks at apple who believe in OpenSource, want to support the community, and want to take it as far as they can. There are others who think it's a big crock and won't want to consider it. Just like any big company, there are going to be factions that aren't always going to agree on what goes on. Life's a bitch, we'll have to see what happens.
BTW, Apple's earnings statements aren't proof enough that Jobs has brought apple back to profitability?
"Apple can't sell support on the MacOS, it is too damn easy to figure out on its own. With all due respect, this isn't Linux here. You don't need a book to figure out how to change your screen resolution."
Feh - never underestimate the stupidity of the end-luser. Why else does Apple have a whole building full of (underpaid and overworked IMO) people in Austin who do nothing but take support calls? I should know, I worked there a lifetime or so ago (1-800-SOS-APPL). Right now their tech support almost surely runs at a loss (or at best break-even). Who is to say that going the RedHat or Sun route (free/low-cost distro, sell support/HW) would not be as profitable? Their money comes from the HW, getting free development input on the SW side can't hurt their bottom line. What they're more afraid of is somebody coming along and porting MacOS X (with everything, not just Darwin/BSD) to Intel, and undercutting their Mac HW profits.
The other problem is cultural though - the Mac userbase has been set in its ways, being used to lots of hand-holding, including free long-term (Apple II was & still is *LIFETIME*) phone tech support 24x7x365. Beyond the obvious costs (the aforementioned building full of bodies), this means you end up supporting old HW and SW long beyond their intended lifetimes, which is an incredible drain. This has changed a bit in recent years; I believe they implemented 1 yr. HW warranty, 90-day free and then pay-per-incident SW support in 1997 (their website mentions this), but they got sued over this & settled recently, see this page for the settlement. They do have the 3-year "AppleCare" HW/SW warranty/support bundle which is possibly a $-maker.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
that's not a haiku
That's true. It's a senryu -- a satiric verse in 5-7-5.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX.
Not gonna happen guys. MS will opensource W2K before Apple opens OSX. It makes no sense whatsoever for Apple to do this: they're going to make a fortune on OSX sales, both from upgrades as well as folks buying Apple-PPC hardware instead of Intel/W2K/Linux systems. (If OSX doesn't make a fortune, Apple's toast- they need to update MacOS bad. I've been waiting for this update since the Copland days...)
What benefit does Apple get from open-source? $5 CheapBytes CDs? A port of OSX to x86 hardware? Oh yeah, Steve loves those ideas...
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
>I am not sure but I would hazard a guess that the Apple Public License is NOT a certified (by OSI) Open Source (TM) licence. As an aside, anyone know why the didn't just use a BSD license?
If they released it under the BSD license, some other vendor could grab the source, improve on it, sell it and never release the source of the changes. If I remember well Apple's license prevent you to do that.
Rumors had been circling about a port of Darwin to x86 (and even less-reliable ones about a complete OSX port to x86, for that matter).
For those looking at the code, how feasible is a port like that, and would it provide any real benefit to, say, Mac admins trying to set up a Mac-friendly OSX Server-like box on the cheap? (That is, advantages over Mac tools on Linux/BSD.)
"On a side note, having a QT streaming server for NT is a good thing... yes, it means your QTSS could be crashy and slow because it's running on NT, but it means few webhosting providers will have an excuse not to provide QTSS, and it'll help fight Windoze Media on its own turf."
It's unfortunate that you did not provide a silly anecdote of a NT server with Media Services crashing every time you sneezed.
The only thing preventing Windows Media player from running on Linux is licensing fees. Certainly if Real Networks - the sworn enemy of Microsoft can obtain a license, so can any Linux programmmer/company with funds.
If your issue is "Open source standards" here's a clue, QT is just as closed source.
Seems to me like you're just wishing for Windows Media to die, why? We Windows users certainly have nothing against it, or the Windows media player. Also, what's with the "Windoze" renaming? An attempt at scoring some bonus moderation points?
What does Apple have that makes their OS mainstream, that Linux doesn't?
A well run PR department.
Apple's UI is good. The last version of OS X Server I used was very nice. The make the coolest monitors on the planet. But all of this pales in comparison to a PR department that could convince people that getting locked into a single vendor is refusing to go along with the herd. That people who build their own systems, and have options are mindless drones. That "think different" is grammatically correct. That "think different" means something. Their PR department has even convinced people that Mac OS is stable.
--Kevin
Hmm, an official x86 release... that's interesting. Leaves the door open for Apple to cross over to Intel's nasty little architecture if Moto and IBM can't get their act together with the G4.
:)
Of course, porting Carbon would be non-trivial.
Here's hoping the G4e isn't too far away...
On a side note, having a QT streaming server for NT is a good thing... yes, it means your QTSS could be crashy and slow because it's running on NT, but it means few webhosting providers will have an excuse not to provide QTSS, and it'll help fight Windoze Media on its own turf.
QT for unix, pleeeeeze apple??
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
Hey Chris, your forgot to ask....
w ith-the-OS. When Mac OS X is the default pre-load, then I'll consider it mainstream via the mega-chainstore definition of mainstream.
What about BSD then Phil?
Like it or not, neither BSD, Linux, Unix *OR* Mac OS X is 'mainstream'-if the definition is one can go to mega-chain-superstore-and-buy-hardware-preloaded-
If you want to say "Linux is Mainstream" then you have to be including BSD. If you are unwilling to say BSD is mainstream, yet call Linux mainstream, I'd LOVE to see your definition of mainstream.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I wish they were more open with there hardware. Im mean in comparion with x86 PPC is really good, and is abit more used then alpha as far as, lower arena area. If only apple opened it up. What do they have to loose, nothing, because with a good Unix orentied OS like OSX, they will get prolly a good amount of developers and easly ported software, so the operating system is really golden.
To me, this is what Unix should of been like in 1995. This is probley one of the best examples of a Unix desktop, fast, easy, and much powerful. Easly scaleable with unix, so you can have multi cpu's. And apple for the most part is good hardware. So if apple was to open up there hardware, and more companies started makeing "apple clones" for cheaper, what os are they gonna run, linux and prolly OSX. Well given the was OSX is, it may be just as easy to run OSX on top, and have a vm or something to run linux under it. This makes a good desktop unixen box, and some good PPC based linux servers is the best way to go.
http://www.freebsd.org
From the press release:
"The core of Mac OS X is the only mainstream operating system following an open source model," said Philip Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new Darwin 1.0 posting includes some of the most advanced operating system technology available, and it's open to our customers and developers so that we may collaborate on the future of the Mac OS."
While its nice to see Apple helping the open source movement, I'm a little weary of their belief that Linux is not a mainstream operating system.
Sure, the Mac OS has been around for a lot longer, but 17%+ of the server market share that Linux holds doesn't make it qualify as a mainstream OS?
At last I checked, Apple only had ~5% of the desktop share, and their server share is non-existent. What does Apple have that makes their OS mainstream, that Linux doesn't?
---------------------------
"There is no knowledge that is not power"
In a discussion I had with a friend of mine, he basically said the following with respect to Apple and thier open source efforts:
Reasons to open all of MacOS X:
1: Open Source R001z!
2: Intel support gives Apple a potentially less expensive platform, gives PC
makers a Microsoft alternative, and keeps Motorola and IBM honest.
3: It's not that tough to recompile anymore and ship fat binaries - in fact,
Apple has experience. The MacOS is pretty well abstracted from the hardware
as is.
4: See #1.
Reasons to not open anything but Darwin:
1: The only thing Apple has to differentiate itself from all the other Unix
vendors is the Mac UI. Give that away? What are you, nuts?
2: Official OS X support for Intel would dilute Apple's support and
development resources - not every company has $18 billion in the bank.
3: Intel hardware is much more varied - see reason number 2.
4: The previous 2 reasons are a good deal of why Windows sucks so hard -
they have so much hardware to support and no control over most drivers.
5: How does giving away OS X make money?
It is really the last question that is important. Who has the business plan that is going to make Apple a fortune by giving away this OS, when all it would really do is create tremendous competition against their hardware platform?
(credit to JHT for the thoughts...)
Well the community doesn't have any $$$ invested in OS X, so it doesn't matter to them if it costs Apple bigtime. They want it out there for a number of reasons, some for ideological reasons, others because they want something for nothing.
The first group, Apple and the industry in general, understand. Believe it or not, they do.
The second, is the one that will cause problems, the folks who don't want to pay for OS X or just want to get the code so they can do something with it.
As OK as this might sound, it could easily be considered greedy by Apple and others. They have spending excess of 300 Million $$$ to develop OS X.
If they give it all away, here's what will happen.
-Apple will suffer a massive investor lawsuit
-Apple will die.
-Every business that was considering Open Source will ask themselves, "What can it do to benefit us?" and answer "Apparently nothing".
-The movement will be discounted in corporate circles and no one will want to deal with it on a serious basis ever again.
Apple can't sell support on the MacOS, it is too damn easy to figure out on its own. With all due respect, this isn't Linux here. You don't need a book to figure out how to change your screen resolution.
Armchair quarterbacking is great. Reality is quite different.
Businesses exist for the sole purpose of making money and little else. Right now there is no clear way for Apple to make money by giving away OS X and the all the code.By whining that they haven't got everything they want, the OSS community makes itself look very bad. Regardless of their reasoning, it sounds to Apple (and others) like:
"But I don't want to have to write the code! You should spend your money to do that and give it to me for free!!"
If they are only insulted, OSS folks should consider themselves lucky.
Of course /. uses the Mozilla picture a lot. CmdrTaco just admit today that he liked it (See the netscape 6 story).
I love the Mozilla logo, too. The red star with the dinosaur is kind of like Wild West meets Godzilla...
...or even better, Chinese Communism meets Barney the Dinosaur!
-
Thats true, the GPL is not intended to benefit the developer, however if a company sells closed source software suddenly threw out all their stuff under the GPL that could be bad. Apple is making sure that they can benefit from this, but unlike Sun for example they are making sure the developers benefit as well.
I was able to tell you read it.. It may be full of exceptions, but it isn't too bad. It is definitely better than the Sun license. You do have to register changes you distribute, but so long as you do so you can use it as freely as GPL code, unless you were working for Apple on that particular modification. For a closed source company moving to Open Source it is a very pragmatic step. Apple doesn't have to worry about a competitor taking their stuff and creating something that they can't benefit from(which would be possible with the BSD License) and it provides options for them to make closed improvements to protect their competitive edge. Yet it provides the code and as much freedom of use as the GPL(more in a way- you can mix it with code under other licenses if you want, though Darwin code you release stays under the APL) for independent developers. Overall I'd say its superior to the GPL, and I'll probably use a modified version of it myself(probably without the clauses allowing me to make closed modifications) for my own projects.
How many 'Open Source' advocates truly return to the community anything?
finally....someone is willing to throw the ball at be for a change...i incedentally got the same run-around from be about a global village modem i was running on my mac...be said it enabling it required proprietary apple hardware info...funny how it worked fine under linuxppc matthew
Now that code is free speech, it seems that Apple has spoken the specifications for the Mac hardware. Inside the Darwin source code is the information necessary to write an operating system kernel that runs on an iMac or a G4 or the iBook ("I said make it look like a Compaq®, not a compact!"); let's see what will come to Be soon.
-----------------------------------------Why do /.ers like BeOS, a closed-source OS?
Will I retire or break 10K?
-Elendale (What's with Slashdot's color? On my computer this story looks all red and stuff. My problem, or theirs?)
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
As I understand it, Darwin is essentially OSX, sans Quartz and the MacOS compatability layer.
First of all, I think we should give credit to Apple for doing this. Yes, I know it's not GPL. I am not sure but I would hazard a guess that the Apple Public License is NOT a certified (by OSI) Open Source (TM) licence. However, this is a great start. We should not flame Apple for not using the GPL but instead encourage them and other companies to do the same. As an aside, anyone know why the didn't just use a BSD license?
Finally, could anyone tell me if they know whether or not OSX is OpenStep compliant? ie, when Quicktime for OSX is released, would it be possible to run it under GNUstep? And further, what are people's opinions on OpenStep/GNUstep? I have been interested lately, and I think that given all the discussion going on lately about cross platform compatability, we should just go ahead and have all the distros be OpenStep compliant. If you would like more information, check out the GNUstep website.
--
I agree that the complexity of the Mac OS will increase with the release of OS X. However, the complexity of administering OS X will not be as great as adminstering a purely UNIX system, such as Darwin.
What I believe Apple is trying to do is take the Mac OS's great interface and put a front-end on the administering aspects of OS X. This is evident in the front-end application they released with OS X Server to configure Apache. Thus, companies, who imac.usr said might "balk", would instead be encouraged to use OS X because they would be able to get great benefits, such as Apache and modern OS goodies, without having to train their system admins to the level that current UNIX admins need to be trained.
Of course, this assumes that these companies would think this through and see the benefits; rather than just having a knee-jerk reaction to the "new complexity" of Mac OS. Considering the wave a few years ago of removing Macs from corporate networks, I'm not so sure that companies really do think things through. The underlying truth that companies need to understand is this: mixed OS networks are a necessity to business because no one OS can satisfy the requirements of an entire company of any significant size.
Any script like this (you might as well use csh) will do the job:
:-( ]
File: fork.ksh
--------------------------------------------
#!/bin/ksh
while [ 1 ]; do
echo "another loop"
nohup fork.ksh &
done
--------------------------------------------
Let this baby run for a while and then try a
graceful shutdown/logoff from their UI...
In 1989 when I got access to a Unix box the first time in my life (it was a SUN running SunOS - another BSD) I made a mistake in my homework assignment and crashed the departments SUN used for the course. Ever since, one of the first "tests" when accessing a new box is this little script...
[and now for the flame
If you would have been able to control your temper, you would have noticed that I wrote the word "deliberately". Any machine or software can be crashed deliberately (keyword here is: boundary conditions) - I was simple annoyed that it was still _that_ easy (given the nimbus Apple is sporting).
And if such a machine is to be used in an investment banks trading room, competing against a NT-workstation running the same software - better make sure it is really stable!
So now the main question: Who is the dweeb here?
... disregarding the fact that (unless Apple got their act together in the last 6 month) it gives BSD a bad name.
We had one of those boxes (with OS-X Server) for testing a couple of months ago. It took me about 10 minutes to crash that machine: no root access necessary, just plain old shell scripting (details upon request).
Too bad Apple isn't that keen on real aggressive pricing, with increased stability this could lead to 'NIXes finally toppling the MS dominance...
I've seen a number of comments disparaging Apple's motives for doing open source. But folks, this is the real thing - Apple has been hiring open source hackers like myself, and part of our jobs is explicitly to improve contacts with the community and come up with creative ways to collaborate. Since I started two months ago, it seems like I've spent as much time discussing open-source strategy with management as actually fiddling with GCC, which is my specific organizational cubbyhole.
I believe Apple will remain committed to open source even without a lot of participation from the rest of the community, but of course we can accomplish much more together. Also, if Apple sees that working with the community at the OS and tools level is enabling it to be more successful overall, that will be a powerful reason to consider open-sourcing other parts of the system; Darwin 1.0 is just the beginning.
There are piles of sources already available, everything from the lowest-level gory stuff in Mach, up to user-land tools, and the only thing in your way is the load on the servers from all the other people downloading! :-) So go for it!
My own specialty is tools, mainly GCC and GDB, and we have some very active and interesting discussion about tools already going on in the Darwin developers list; I'd love to have more people join in. I also posted much more technical detail on Apple's local mods to GCC there, along with some ideas about how to get it added to FSF GCC.
Stan Shebs
shebs@apple.com
This is troublesome.
Is it Apple, open-sourced,
Or just Apple Sauce?
Thank you.
It finally loaded. At
second question:
http://www.publicsource.apple.com/ps-faq.html,
Q. Does the Apple Public Source License qualify as an Open Source
license?
Yes, the Open Source Initiative has determined that the Apple Public
Source License is conformant to the "Open Source Definition:"
http://www.opensource.org/osd.html.
You might want to read that license again.
Yes, Apple "grants" you the "right" to distribute your modifications or more specifically to "deploy" modified code. But, they retain the right to use, to modify, and to distribute your modifications as they see fit without royalty. In other words, they can take your changes, make one or two changes, incorporate their hacked up version of your code into commercial OSX without folding that code back into Darwin.
You don't have full rights to any code that you've written.
Thanks to the BSD license, they can get away with this. If their code were based on the Linux kernel rather than Mach and BSD, they couldn't. That's why this puppy's userland is based on FreeBSD rather MkLinux/GNU.
That said, this sounds like a really cool project. I've always been impressed with Mach and microkernels in general. I'd like to get a BSD-lites system up and running or maybe jump in with the HURD.
It might be cool if we could steal the thread model from Mach and somehow make it fit in Linux. Then, we'd have a truly lightweight thread model instead of one based on the Unix process model.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
It's interesting to note that for the most part, the BSD community considers Darwin to be one of their own. If you look at www.daemonnews.org, you'll see link buttons at the bottom of the page for all the BSDs, including BSDi and MAC OSX.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
1) If even you don't know that "linux" is a proper noun, it can't be too mainstream.
2) Trolling (redundantly) with a famous-guy +1 bonus is uncool.
3) It is time to moderate me down for 2).
4) Thank you.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Yes, 3rd party developers were pretty pissed at the cancellation of Copland, however, they would have been more upset if they had actually produced apps for it.
/.-ers won't, here is the skinny on Copland.
If you want to get a good insight into why it failed, read Gil Amelio's book "On The Firing Line - My 500 Days At Apple". Assuming a great number of
Copland was designed to be a direct competitor to Windows 95. However, by the time it was two years late, Amelio came aboard and saw that there was no way in hell it would be complete until 1999 at the earliest.
Not good.
What made it especially bad was the fact it was being managed by an engineer, which as the past 20 years of computing has shown, is a very bad thing. Copland was missing numerous key features, such as memory protection and real Preemptive Multitasking.
Which it was never intended to have. Unfortunately, Copland was an OS out of time. It was supposed to be done in 96 or 97 and be a stepping stone to Gershwin, which would supposedly put NT to shame and include complete backwards compatibility with all the cool features of a modern OS. Too bad the Copland team had never thought to do any work on Gershwin, and it remained a feature spec on paper, now and forever.
While the Copland team was neglecting Gershwin and floundering the development of its own OS. It removed almost all of the engineers working on System 7 development under the outrageous assumption that it was still following its original development schedule and that System 7 would be obsolete in a couple of months, so what was wrong with halting support?
Quite a bit actually. This is the reason the whole System 7.5/Performa time is so embarrassing to Mac users. Especially because so many machines from that era are still in use, pissing off PC users to this day, resulting in skewed opinions and the chant of "Macs Suck" that is so often heard.
Anyway, Amelio dumped Copland, bought out NeXT (Be was too greedy and Bill Gates was fibbing about how easy it would be to resolve some of the technical problems involved with Mac NT).
The result was Rhapsody. Development continued for about a year, and things were looking up. That is until Adobe, Macromedia and quite a few other software makers realized they would have to completely rewrite all their apps for Objective C. (a.k.a the Yellow Box and Cocoa).
An collective "Oh Shit" went out across the Cupertino campus. So realizing that app vendors would desert them, Apple decided to revise the Classic API, put in into Rhapsody, make it backwards compatible with the Classic MacOS, put in a newer Mach Kernel, create a new display engine along with a host of other improvements and call it Mac OS X.
Halfway through this, they shipped a server version of Rhapsody called Mac OS X Server simply to prove they were doing something worthwhile.
Now, everybody's happy. The users (mostly), the app makers and most of the press.
IANAL-
Yes, Apple "grants" you the "right" to distribute your modifications or more specifically to "deploy" modified code. But, they retain the right to use, to modify, and to distribute your modifications as they see fit without royalty. In other words, they can take your changes, make one or two changes, incorporate their hacked up version of your code into commercial OSX without folding that code back into Darwin
They retain the right to use your code, under the same license. Unless your code is developed specifically for apple, your code stays in the apple public license.
You hereby grant to Apple and all third parties a non-exclusive, royalty-free license, under Your Applicable Patent Rights and other intellectual property rights owned or controlled by You, to use, reproduce, modify, distribute and Deploy Your Modifications of the same scope and extent as Apple's licenses under Sections 2.1 and 2.2;
This is saying that Apple can take your modifications and distribute them as per the Apple Public License
Apple retains all rights, title and interest in and to the Original Code and any Modifications made by or on behalf of Apple ("Apple Modifications"), and such Apple Modifications will not be automatically subject to this License. Apple may, at its sole discretion, choose to license such Apple Modifications under this License, or on different terms from those contained in this License or may choose not to license them at all.
This is the section I think concerns you, this is stating that modifications made by or for Apple can be released under other licenses.
Here are a couple of examples of how I see this working:
You take Darwin, modify it and add other software to make it Linux compatible. You distribute this new Darwin on your own. Apple can then use your modifications under the terms of the Apple Public License, and therefore must release the source. This is covered under Section 3 of the license. SInce your personal modifications are your own intellectual property, which they recognize as such, they must abide by the same terms you must under the Apple Public License.
Now, if Apple calls you up and has you under contract of some sort to do the same thing, those modifications are covered under section 11 of the license, as they are done not for you but for Apple, and those modifications are Apples property not yours. Thus Apple can release the code under any license it desires.
The GUI is based on Quartz, a way-cool vector based rendering engine that came out of NeXTStep. There is no X at all in MacOS X, although Jon Carmack has worked on porting XFree (which already runs on LinuxPPC) to Darwin
Why are you surprised so few people have installed it? Most of the "hard-core" developers I knew that would-a-loved Darwin, like me that did driver development and couldn't find work ~96-97, left the platform in droves during the same time period. (Actually, the death of OpenDoc and Apple's almost intentional poor treatment of faithful hard-core developers -- oh the stories I can tell -- the pooching of Copland and kernel/driver architectures -- the absolute emotional response Apple had to developers offering suggestions that were bitter pills, contrasting Apple's policy of cliquey-positive-re-enforcing blindess...).
For open source to work, you need a healthy hacker-like developer base, wraught with enthusiasm. Just think of QuickDraw 3D and OpenGL politics and hurdles! The evil cycle of no tools, (no support/hope), people that try provide going under as niche markets dry up... The resource pool to embrace Darwin is very small.
I have two copies of 1.2 X Server that arrived. I have Darwin. I don't have a Mac I can install them on (a lie, it works on my G3 upgrade with some diddling), and until the hardware discount comes back to the associate developer program, I cannot justify buying a new Macintosh. Even if I did, why would I bother? Bereskin said publically that OS X Server would never be updated! (Funny how this update appeared.) Why would the faithful support something they were told [is dead dead dead] by Apple itself?
There is a lot of bad history and bitter developers.
Bernie Wieser (bernie@octavian.com)
"Apple intends to be the premier Java development platform." WWDC '96 keynote
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
So let me see if I have this straight: Apple attempts to offer us a modern Unix-based OS, that for the first time in any Unix-varient's history, will have a large library of commercial applications avialable. Apple attempts to do something that has never been done in the history of any of the major personal computer OS's: give us access to the source code. John Carmack, who certainly could ignore Apple and Linux and just do stuff for Windows, decides to be *extremely* gracious and donate some of his time to the project. He also asks some people to help. And the reactions are: 1) Apple did me wrong in the past. Screw them. 2) I don't like how the open source license is worded. What am I missing here? Yes, Apple has made many extremely stupid moves in the past. Yes, we've all been burned by some of them. But good Lord people! There has *never* been an opportunity like this in the history of personal computing. If the community were to get behind Darwin, it could become the first real competitor to MS. People whine and whine how what they really want is Linux with great apps. Well, here's your chance. So far it sounds like we're going to let this opportunity pass because a bunch of hackers have their nose out of joint. If John Carmack can see the potential good that can come out of this, can't some of you do the same? (And yes, I'm going to do my part. I can't write drivers, but I'm certainly going to write as many apps as I can and port as many tools as I can.) Wade
OFFICIAL UEO DOCUMENT FOLLOWS
As the captain of SeaQuest, DSV, I'd just like to express my sadness at the release of Darwin. As you know, Darwin was getting a little old, and I was tired of him and Lucas always screwing up our plans. So, last Thursday, the senior officers and I finally reached the decision to release Darwin.
Capt. Bridger
Seaquest, DSV
END OFFICIAL UEO DOCUMENT
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
It's got the BSD core that's been discussed before, along with Mach 3.0
Thanks to Mach 3.0's inovative microkerel design, I've gotten the closest shave ever!
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
On the one hand, it's fair enough that Apple graphics (perhaps nee NeXT) are Apple's, but there are rumblings that Apple wants to get "medieval" over this. There has been a "reaction of silence," as well as more vigorous reactions.
The distressing part, described in this article, is that it appears that access to the OPENSTEP API may not be as open as everyone would wish to believe. To wit,
Of course, the most distressing part is this message purported to have come from Steve Jobs, where the salient bit reads: From: Steve Jobs Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 10:19 AM To: Lucas C. Wagner Subject: GNUstep Lucas, As you may know, Apple owns the Cocoa and OpenStep APIs, and will not feel great about others using its intellectual property without premission. Best, Steve
Open is as open does. If Apple winds up suing anyone over GNUstep, I'd say that tells you how committed they really are to "open source."
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
..and here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX.
I was listening to Eric Raymond at the Geek Pride thing last weekend. On one hand, I was impressed with how he's obviously given his pitch to skeptical audiences and how that made him sound much more convincing than the the preaching to the choir that one normally hears here. On the other hand, I couldn't help thinking, "OK, we've heard the theoretical arguments now. And what has it done for anybody in reality?"
If I were at Apple, I'd be waiting for somebody - anybody - to demonstrate that free development can really be more profitable than proprietary work. (Note that a stock valuation greater than the worth of Belgium isn't profit. Note also that I'm talking about open sourcing a product for which the company makes the primary investment, not taking existing GPL software, packaging it and maybe paying somebody to improve it.) Until I saw that, why on earth would I risk Apple's current profitability to be the first to test out ESR's theories?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
now, that's a high-octane statement, so please give me a chance to put it in context before hauling out the flamethrowers..
according to the documents ESR has written, which are arguably the core of the Open Source manifesto, developers have a responsibility to the project from which the code comes. the coin of the Open Source realm is respect for the primary developers, and participation in the project for which the code was originally written.
now, i've never seen anyone say, "if Apple opened their GUI, i'd work to improve the Mac OS." it's always, "if Apple opened their GUI, we could port the good parts to Linux." that's not participation, and it's not respect. it's pillage.
that being the case, i'd suggest everyone take another look at _The Magic Cauldron_, section 6, where ESR discusses reasons to keep source closed:
"The real question is whether your gain from spreading the development load exceeds your loss due to increased competition from the free rider."
in the case of Apple opening the source to its GUI (and all its other crown jewels), i submit that the Linux community shows significantly more interest in causing Apple increased losses through competition than it does in helping spread the development load on Apple's own projects. until that changes, it seems to me that Apple's most rational choice is to keep the source for those projects closed.
if we want that code opened, we have to do more than sit around saying how deserving we are. we have to convince Apple that the community will give enough back to compensate for the inevitable jerks whose only response will be "thanks.. sucker! hey everybody, look what i've got!"
Apple took a lot of heat when they first opened Darwin because people (no less than PMS) considered it "a cynical attempt to leverage the community for free labor." i think there's a risk that people who want Apple to open the GUI and Quartz (and the Sorensen codec, for those of you who want a Linux QT player) may be doing the same thing in reverse. they're shouting 'Open Source' to cynically leverage free work out of private companies, with no intent to repay the original developers, even according to the standards of the Open Source community itself. they want easier competition, not a chance to participate.
i don't think the idea of Open Source can legitimately be used to force someone into a disadvantageous position. if we're not willing to put up a critical mass of developers who'll work to Apple's benefit, i don't think our own standards give us the right to demand more than we're getting.
Seriously, though, the next few months will be very hard on a lot of Mac system admins, I suspect. Most of the ones I've had to deal with are people who got roped into doing it part time (since most places only have a few Macs, and even places that have a lot -- like certain government institutions -- still get by with one or two dedicated Mac techs, if that many). They know enough to install system software, but next to nothing about tuning a system, or knowing what needs updating and what should be left alone (or thrown away), and why having multiple copies of Acrobat Reader is not a good thing, especially when they're different versions.
People like myself, who saw the writing on the wall years ago, and who already had some Unix experience, will (hopefully) be in high demand as the complexity of the Mac OS goes up with OS X's release. But I fear many companies will balk at the thought of having to suddenly train and support their Mac staff. "But I thought they were easy to use!" Yeah, easy to use, but you still have to know how to administer them properly.
I suppose the benefit is that suddenly there will be a lot more people looking for Unix knowledge, and a lot more people trying to get it. I just hope Apple can find a way to support those of us who support them, by offering more training (the new AppleCare program is a start) or even...shudder...some kind of certification program, to separate the gurus from the weenies. Not that it's worked especially well with the MCSE...
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I was elated when Apple announced the original Open Source Darwin initiative. I never would have guessed they would go for it, and I think it is a Very Good Thing.
Getting everything together for a public release is a very non-trivial task. I know the hassles we go through, and darwin is 100x the size of our codebase.
After all that work, including pressing CD's, it was met with a fairly resounding silence.
The darwin mailing lists were dead. It sometimes seemed like there were a grand total of a dozen people with darwin installed.
It was looking like this might go down as a large example of how going to the trouble of Open Source doesn't get you anything but hassle.
It didn't help that darwin was basically unusable by itself, because all you got was a single very slow text console with messed up key bindings. Not exactly a happy development environment.
(most of the active development work is done in the usable environment of OS-X server)
The general response that interested people gave as to why they weren't doing any development with darwin was that "everything is going to change in the next release" (the driver architecture was massively reworked).
Well, the new release is here now. There is still the problematic issue that you can't run ANY current gui on darwin 1.0. OS-X server and the developer seeds of OS-X client are both out of sync with the darwin codebase. All the excuses won't really go away until the next OS-X client release.
A couple months ago, I took on the porting of X windows to Darwin, so it could actually be considered halfway usable by itself.
I released the patches to get X windows running under MacOS-X server, which was basically the same core as the earlier darwin release.
I was then given the same excuse as other people -- why bother porting to the native darwin video and input drivers if everything is going to change soon?
As of now, I am actively feeling guilty about not finishing it. Everything is there for me now, I just need to find the time.
I had been spending my weekends on either GLX or darwin X server work after Q3 shipped, but my R&D "research" has shifted to "development" faster than I expected, and the past few weekends have been monopolized by new engine work. I'll get to it within the next month, but if someone wants to pick up first, feel free...
It may turn out that many of ESR's arguments just don't pan out for Apple, as far as having outsiders improve the core codebase. Even so, releasing the source will benefit Apple by giving application developers the "ultimate docs" on the OS.
I think Apple deserves a lot of credit for the step.
John Carmack
Very good. I like it. Personally I would probably prefer it over the GPL on first reading, I'd have to print it out and compare it clause for clause to really judge. But at first glance here are the benefits:
No royalties
Source MUST be included if you distribute it, whether modified or not
The license to use the code is automatically terminated if you violate it.
You can distribute it ON YOUR OWN, you do have to register mods but are not prevented from distribution
Apple does get full rights to use any of your code, but you still have full rights to distribute. Mods made for apple specifically are under whatever license apple wants, but personal mods are still under this one. Modifications are REQUIRED to be documented clearly.
This is a great thing. You could take Darwin and port say BASH, other necesary GNU utilities and throw X on it to make a full OS. The license specifically allows you to mix it with code from other licenses, with the sensible provision that code under the Apple license is clearly marked as such. I would have to look at the GPL more carefully, but Apple seems to have made a far better balance between the interests of the otiginal developer and the interests of OSS developers in the real world than the GPL does