Slashdot Mirror
No Love For Darwin?
There's an interesting column regarding the attention -- or lack thereof -- that Darwin is getting, at least compared to OS X. Somogyi points some out some interesting diversions of interest that people are having, and what exactly is Apple /doing/ about Darwin?
Sounds exactly like bundles, except that you can't double-click on the folder to open the app (it sounds like you have to dig into the hierarchy).
Cool system, regardless. I just see Bundles as a further refinement of it.
----------
You're wrong and I'll correct you.
Besides an easy RTFM fireball I could throw at you, here's what Darwin is: a package. A wrapper. A collection of things tied up in one nifty, cudly handle.
What's inside is the following:
A MACH (3.0) kernel
A FreeBSD/NetBSD Unix layer
NetInfo directory service
HFS, AppleTalk and other Mac-specific layers
USB, FireWire and other drivers
QuickTime Streaming Server
Get the full list of things contained in Darwin.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
We have stuff like FreeBSD binary support etc. for Linux/Intel. So how long, I wonder, before someone figures out how to bring OS X binary support to PPC Linux?
Breakfast served all day!
If you're developing software for Mac OS X, it's a lot easier to get stuff done if you can read the Darwin source. It's also a bonus for Apple that more eyes on the source means that deep bugs are dug out and fixed faster.
If your criteria for judging the success of Darwin is the number of publicly-traded companies selling packages containing plastic discs with Darwin code printed on them, then you're going to be REALLY missing the point.
jhw
Making development teams compete makes Jobs a jackass? Hmm it seems to me the people working for Apple are not only there voluntarily but they are getting paid regardless. Around the same time you had Microsoft's one development team trying like mad to get a GUI (read Xerox clone) out of a compiler and into a product box. The Macintosh made a huge splash when it was released and really did its part to advance personal computing, in ways moreso than Windows.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Does anyone remember this Macworld article: "Apple Goes Open Source with Mac Server: Surprise move will adcelerate [sic] Mac OS development efforts"? I think the following quote really sets the tone of Apple's relationship with the open source community.
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
I can only hope for Apple's sake that Ernie was terribly misquoted or that he's the only one at Apple who feels this way. But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community, I fear that my hopes are unfounded.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich. And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way. As long as Darwin is nothing more than an enabler for Apple's proprietary Mac OS X, the vast majority of the open source community doesn't really benefit from helping out.
I used to think more highly of Apple. It appears that they are merely joining the herds who are attempting to cash in on open source without joining our community.
This isn't really the case.
I recommend everyone here to join the Darwin-Users or Darwin-Dev mailing lists if they are interested.
If you read those mailing lists, you will understand that the vast majority of the code that is in the *CVS* repositories available for Darwin is exactly what the Apple employees are working on *right now*. IIRC the only directories that aren't synched daily are the "xnu" (kernel) trees. This is because many of the drivers that Apple has internally are 3rd party, and thus are not available to be released into the Open Source community.
What Apple has done with Darwin 1.2 is finally taken out and approved all the 3rd party code that was in OS X PB and released it into the Darwin community as a new Binary. The sources have actually been there almost since PB was released.
There is a wonderful amount of work being done on Darwin. Mainly focusing on getting it to boot/run on Intel and older PPC machines. There's also some work going into the X system.
Amen to that. I'm really hoping OSX will lead to a surge of interest in GNUstep. It's a beautiful system that, alas, hasn't ever seen much mindshare.
I don't know about making GNUstep look like OSX-- though a good theming architecture is something the developers will be looking into someday-- but at least they have rolled in some of Apple's changes to the OpenStep API, selectable via #ifdef MACOSX (IIRC).
There has, however, been talk about possible bad blood with Apple. Steve Jobs has been quoted in the past as saying, "We will vigorously protect our IP w.r.t. NeXT/OpenStep," and if GNUstep makes it possible to build Cocoa apps off of OSX, Apple might see a benefit in squashing the project.
I don't think that in itself is too likely, because it's kind of ridiculous to sue for a rogue implementation of your API (as long as they don't call it OpenStep, of course). Some patent issues have been brought up, however, w.r.t. database interfaces in OpenStep's Enterprise Object Framework (EOF). These are important because the EOF is one of the biggest plusses of the OpenStep standard, as I've heard. (Supposedly makes writing database-capable apps incredibly easy. Not being a DB guy myself, I have to take this at face value)
Personally, I'm hoping some kind of amicable arrangement can happen between Apple and GNUstep. Doesn't have to be official, doesn't have to require any of their resources, only a tacit agreement that GNUstep's and Apple's interests are not opposed to each other's. Considering Apple has the power to change their interface to break implementation compatibity a la MS, such an arrangement would prove invaluable, both to GNUstep and to the integrity of the OpenStep/Cocoa API definition.
iSKUNK!
The way I see it: OSX's most exciting parts are the GUI.
Sort of. Another angle is that it's a Unix OS that actually runs Mac apps with close to zero speed penalty and tight integration.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Sorry... I missed this part in my other post:
Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source?
Because that's how they're going to make money (of all things)?
here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?"
In Apple's defense, they haven't officially bitched about lack of support. This is just a ZDNet column. I think Apple's just fine with the community doing whatever they want with Darwin. I don't think they feel the community really owes them anything (except making their own CDs). Sure it's not exactly what you want, but it's a huge step in the right direction. They've gone a a lot further than Microsoft or Sun has. I mean, you're getting a fully-functioning OS for free (sans an X server). And if you're a Mac developer, you're much better off now.
Would you rather they have not released any source at all?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
"It's as if we had hired a huge bunch of programmers for free," asserts Ernie Prabhakar, Apple's product manager for Mac OS X Server. "We'll have a final product with better performance and new features."
This is just a soundbyte so the press knows how do deal with the information. Remember where you took the article from: Macworld. Macworld readers don't care about stuff like licenses and kernels (although this printed as well).
But given Apple's lack of real participation in the open source community
Yeah, they've only given you an open source OS, an open source streaming media server, OpenPlay, NetSprocket and released it all under a license approved by the OSI. Oh, and one of their employees does work on Apache.
This quote exemplifies a fundamental misunderstanding of the open source process. We work on open source software because it's ours: it belongs to the community. We don't work on Free Software to make Apple rich.
If you really want commercial companies to release open source software on an ongoing basis, there has to be a balance in the expectations. It's silly to come down on Apple because they want to make money. They have shareholders. But at the same time, I don't think Apple really expects Darwin to "make [them] rich."
There are a variety of reasons Apple decided to do Darwin, but one of them is that Apple's VP of Engineering, Avie Tevanian (remember? one of the guys who wrote Mach, which was later given to the FSF?) felt that Apple should give something back to the community.
And we certainly don't work on open source software so that Apple can take our code, modify it, and prevent us from using the end result without paying--or certainly denying us access to work based off of our code.
I don't see how any of this is possible based on the license. If you do, please share. Yes, they copy things from Darwin and paste them in OSX, but they cannot cut things from Darwin entirely and put them only in Mac OS X. You and the community get to keep everything you make forever.
If Apple wants to benefit from the open source community, Apple has to participate in a larger way.
You make it sound as if Apple is complaining about the level of support Darwin has received. They are not.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Having used Aqua for a couple days, I have to agree with you. It sucks. It is so damn slow compared to just about anything else I've tried in recent memory.
This has nothing to do with Aqua (as a theme) and everything to do with debugging code and incompete video drivers (and other display components). I imagine KDE and GNOME didn't have to go through this phase since X11 does it for them.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
most importantly no gcc!
:)
If gcc was there, people would expect Mac users to compile their own software. This makes even less sense than expecting Windows users to compile their own software. You can download compilers along with an IDE and lots of other goodie from Apple (free membership in ADC required).
Also the load times for EVERYTHING were really bad, up to 15 seconds to load a terminal window sometimes, and that's one of the faster loading apps.
How much RAM do you have again?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I have 64MB of RAM, which was not the point I intended to make, Gnome/Sawfish on the same hardware does a much better job as far as speed goes. [...] It's not that I have this much RAM or that much, the point is what is OSX doing that requires so much extra time?
OSX is still in beta. The goal is to get the realistic minimum down to 64MB from the current 128MB. But that's not really the point. The point is this:
Get Darwin and an X server. Install gnome. I bet at this point, the terminal windows and MP3 player will open pretty damn fast on your 64MB iBook. So why not use just Darwin with X? Probably because you want QuickTime, Quartz, Carbon apps, Classic compatibility, font and color management, AppleScript, Java 2 support, GameSprockets, OpenGL, Cocoa APIs and everything else that Mac users and developers are expecting. So where do all of these things live? If they won't fit in milk bottles, then you're going to have to put them in ram.
If you want Mac OS X to work just like Linux + gnome/sawmill, you might as well use Darwin. But if you want all the functionality and mainstream apps that Mac OS currently enjoys, then you're going to have the resources to accomodate them. As I said before, optimization will take place before the 1.0 product ships, but it's probably not going to match a bare-bones GNOME/Sawmill/Linux installation.
And I don't agree that including GCC would make users feel compelled to compile everything? When was the last time you recompiled everything in Linux? I know I have compiled parts (X, Mozilla, etc.), but it does not mean that I have to compile X myself.
I think we're just going fundamentally disagree on this. I think having compilers installed (or even on the same CD) makes it too easy for developers to say "just compile it yourself," which just isn't an option for most current Mac users. I think it's safe the say that Jobs' people from NeXT have some experience in this area.
You can get a ton of dev tools for free from http://apple.com/developer/, including compilers, an IDE (Project Builder), a RAD app (Interface Builder), a Java class browser and plenty of other goodies. The total disk image is 66MB. Or for $200, they'll send you CDs every month for a year with everything you need to write software.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
One thing that I've never seen in the OSX reviews (and I have read most if not all that I've come across) is a feature-by-feature list of things shared between OSX and Darwin. Does anybody that has played with both (or just Darwin) care to make a stab at it?
I am most interested in things like the Frameworks concept, bundles (i.e. ".app" directories) from the NeXT world, NetInfo and of course, XML configuration.
I don't really care about Aqua, Java support or Display PDF. All those are nice toys but I just want a clean, 21st century Unix, and Darwin looks like the best contender...
I don't understand your post. Are you suggesting OSX supports the
Win32 API? I'm afraid that's not the case: the best it does is it's
virtual PC mode, which is more the equivalent of VMware, and isn't
really all that interesting. I heard some talk of porting WINE to the
OSX a while back, though...
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
It has the overhead of dealing with two OSs spliced together
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Aqua (or Quartz, rather) DOES slow down OSX. DPDF isn't free you know. Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish. It has the overhead of dealing with two OSs spliced together (even if they run in the same process space, they weren't designed to run that way) and Mach isn't exactly known for being a speed demon. (Wonder why HURD is using a custom version?) To tell the truth, OSX would have been a lot more interesting with a clean-slate internal design.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Illiterate welfare mothers have just as much right to vote as snobby technology dweebs. Its the governments job to bend over backwards to make sure everyone can vote. If you don't like that, go back to 18th centry Great Britain, where only land-owning adult white males could vote.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Let's see. a 1Ghz Athlon performs at least half as well as an Alpha 21264, and I haven't seen any of those for $350 including motherboard. PPC might be great clock for clock, but given the 700MHz difference in clock for comparably priced processors, its not catching up with X86 anytime soon. Not to mention the fact that a 1.2GHz Athlon is not only a lot faster, but for the same price as a PPC machine, it makes MUCH better configured. (Easily double the RAM, a GeForce2Ultra, and a larger harddrive, better DVD decoder, etc.) As for Sun, I'm still waiting for it to come within half the price/performance ratio of a 1.2GHz Athlon w/ GeForce2 Ultra. x86 might be inelegant, but RISC carries not only a reasonable premium, but enough of one that puts it out of the reach of most people.
PS> And no, I will not use an older Alpha that performs 70% as well as an Athlon just so I'm not using Intel.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, last I recalled the POWER chips are WAY out of the consumer league. Some of the chips are (were) as big as Poloriods! (4096mm^2 die size! Yikes!)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, people aren't being forced to use WMA. They use it because it is free and whoops everything except DivX and Sonorson in the quality department in high bandwidth streams. For low bandwidth streams, it doesn't get much better than WMA (depending on the type of video of course.)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's a great idea... except for the fact that it is painstaking. I install and uninstall software everyday. No way in hell I'm dealing with all these symlinks (or learning how to use something like Encap, which is way to complex for a relativly simple job!) to install software. BeOS has probably the best idea on how to manage software. All apps are contained in a folder (kinda like NeXTStep) It is just a regular folder (no hacks like bundles) and can be moved at will. Local libraries are local to the app. Anything installed in appdir/lib or appdir/add-on is automatically searched out. Configuration could use work (right now it consists of a bunch of text and binary files jammed into /boot/home/config/settings) but overall, adding and removing BeOS software is scary simple. Just the way it should be.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Secondly, OSX will always be sluggish.
Blanket statements like this aren't very useful. OS X has absolutely no speed problems on my G4/400, and is entirely usable on my Powerbook G3/300.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Being usable and being "Insanely great" are two different things.
Sort of, but not really. Legacy Mac apps run in a compatibility environment that is as a single OS X process running at low priority. The only reason you'd be likely to see performance degradation is if you don't have enough RAM to hold the OS 9 environment and have to swap a lot. That's why Apple says 128 MB is required for the beta, when really it is acceptable with 64 if you don't run legacy Mac apps.
>>>>>>>>>>>
And OS should take no more than 32MB of RAM. And I'm not talking about OS9 and OSX, I'm talking about BSD and Mach.
Which would push back the release another few years, and prevent it from taking advantage of existing BSD software (apache, ssh, perl, etc).
>>>>>>>>>>
This is a plug for BeOS. Apple was about this far away from buying Be before Jobs got butted in. In that case, all existing BSD software would have been usable (since BeOS is POSIX compatible and already has ports of all of these) and the only real work Apple would have to do is design Quartz, Aqua, and the OS9 environment (which they had to do anyway) and port OpenStep to BeOS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Huh? Even the HURD project agrees that there are better microkernels than Mach to use. They use a custom version of Mach4, so yea, I would say Mach3 is antiquated. And wrapper around, Mach3 is FreeBSD 3.2, which runs in kernel space so it doesn't have to use messaging. What the hell are you talking about?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
In general, I tend not to like anything like bundles that have a different UI representation from the actual, physical representation. As such, I don't like UI tricks like the .hidden files. Its just matter of personal preference, but I must say that in general, BeOS apps are right under the top level directory. Another nifty thing is that there is a feature that allows apps to be launched by app-sig, so apps can be moved around, and no app-dependency linkes will break.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Actually I used Great Britain, because in general, people in the US didn't have the notion that the aristocracy or middle calss are the only people with rights.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
>>>>>>>>>>>
Okay, I have to give that to you. But organization is not enough to save an OS. It is nice though.
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
QNX, BeOS, and Windows don't need module recompiling. Hell, DOS loads its drivers dynamically.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
>>>>>>>>>
Yea, a nice UI features, but it is only slightly better than the BeOS or MacOS "one folder, one app" paradigm.
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
>>>>>>>>>>
How? It is basically FreeBSD 3.2 wrapped around Mach. Mach is far from fast (its messaging is particularly slow) and there IS overhead involved by negotiating the two systems.
5) Automatic kext loading
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sorry, I'm not familiar wit kext.
6) NetInfo
>>>>>>>>>>
That's a user-space tool. I'm fairly sure something similar could be made for any other OS.
7) IOKit driver architecture
>>>>>>>
Again, I'm not too familiar with the driver architecture, could you elaborate?
8) More flexible BSD-like license
>>>>>>>>>>
Darwin's license is MORE restrictive than FreeBSD's!
9) Corporate support
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Umm, Darwin is unsupported OSS software.
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
I'm not familiar with dyld, but again, Mach-) and FAT binaries are nice, but not really a great salient point of the OS. Also, multiple-arch support really isn't a wide-spread issue. If anything, people will prefer to download i386 or PPC only versions to save the bandwidth.
Given the limitations of Darwin, the above-mentioned features are nifty, but they're really just something cool that might get a passing glance, not something that really makes the OS better.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Sounds alot like stow. I haven't played around with it though, but it looks like its been around forever.
And how big an audience would that reach? I am not only refering to the size of the Linux market, but the fact that there are so many binary forms of Linux out there, that Apple would be forced to pick just one version on one platform (for example RedHat 7 on Intel) to support. And what would everyone do then, scream at them for not suporting their effort to get Linux on a Toaster running... And where would this benifit Apple, who is a company after all, and would probably have to pay all those Codec writers another fee to add another platform to the contract (because the orriginal contracts never included Linux.. only MacOS and Windows). They are already having enough problems getting third party drivers added into MacOS X because the third parties want more money for the right to re-compile these drivers, and this is even a bigger issue on the Darwin side.
You forget what I think is the most impressive feature of bundles: how to handle library code.
As well as installing library bundles in a central location, application bundles (not sure about other types) can contain library code in their bundle. When an application loads a library that is installed both locally and system-wide, the most recent version (using real version numbers, not just dates) is loaded. The downside is a lot of redundant library code stored in bundles, but a few megs of HD space is worth it to avoid DLL-hell. (Plus, I'm sure someone will come out with a bundle optimizer that will remove unnecessary bits like that.)
All this, of course, is to facilitate one of the oldest and nicest paradigms of Macintosh: to install an application you copy it to your hard disk, to uninstall it you drag it to the trash. When I first started using DOS, I was astounded at all the pointless individual files that cluttered up each directory. I had no idea what the file was for (8.3 names didn't help) or what would break if it were erased. On Macs, it was rare to find a file that you didn't know where it came from (creator codes are cool that way). But this was in 1991, around about System 7.5 the extensions folder started balooning like mad. Apple wants to return sanity to file system management, and I like it.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
Darwin is a case in point. Apple is clearly feeling the Open Source waters. If you were Steve Jobs, would you say, "Hmm, we've spent literally thousands of man-years on developing the technology behind the MacOS and our NeXT tools. I think we should just give this stuff away for free and make *that* the main thrust of our OS effort!"
Uhh.. not likely. Apple has finite resources. One thing that continually amazes me is that people seem to think that a large computer company has infinite resources to throw at any given technical challenge. The reality is that even an Open Source effort like Darwin requires time and money. Even more important, and scarce, is human capital.
The fact is, Apple can't trust an Open Source effort with their flagship software at this point. The entire future of Apple is at stake. It may be feasible to pull Darwin and OS X onto the same track at some point, but to expect that in the midst of a make or break project, Apple is going to siphon off extra effort for Darwin is just not realistic.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I believe fat binaries are still supported as part of Darwin, and thus are also part of MacOS X. If Apple can convince vendors to ship PowerPC/x86 fat binaries when they first start shipping MacOS X, it would allow Apple to start selling x86 hardware with a large installed base of software right from the start.
I found this old post by Paul Marcos
BTW: Why doesn't Linux support this kind of thing?And there I am, the FIRST in this whole Linux zealot community forum that simply clarifies: "because it's not Open Source".
Now that you all got nice Free click-and-drool GUI systems you suddenly have completely forgotten about the ideals that got you there in the first place. While *I* think that now that you actually _can_ point and drool with Linux, people would become more reluctant to demand true Freedom.
You wrote:
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
And earlier on, you wrote:
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
To which I can only respond:
The business rationale behind "finished" software doesn't really enter into GNU's reasons for releasing GNUStep, so don't look for one, or even complain about GNUStep not being finished enough to satisfy you. Never ever complain about Free Software, it's written without wanting anything from you in return. Just use it, or don't.
And I'll complain about propietary software whenever I want, thank you very much. Especially when it's misleadingly disguised as Open Source.
BTW, I can't remember to have shown you a photo of myself. You'd have noticed that my head is actually rather blocky, not anything like pointy at all, if I had. But your pointy head didn't see my cynicism when I talked about the Amazon licensing stuff, nooo. You'd rather ask about the age of the GNUStep project. Don't you know that that is generally considered not very polite, asking about someones age? And besides, it doesn't matter anything, too. The code base is there. You can use it and enhance it at wish. Err... I wasn't stuttering when I said that the first time around, now was I?
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
My initial reading of the license was that it was copyleft. Now, based on what people are saying here, it sounds a lot like the SCSL, which was DOA for obvious reasons.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
By copylefting the back end, they alienated the BSD community. By closing the front end, they alientated the GPL community.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
<pedantry>
If you're using a language with no booleans than you may need to do some of that, but if not please just do
if Infornaut.issarcastic {
...
...
} else {
}
</pedantry>
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
To all folks that want to try: you need a PIIX IDE interface (at least it was true a couplke of month ago, and have not changed).
So, I had no luck booting it with a Gigabyte/Athlon and a K7M/Athlon.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Personally, I like OSes that can do both, and I imagine anybody would.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Actually I do believe the interface is important. It allows the graphical human mind to be able to grasp the relationships between the data a lot quicker, which is what it is all about, anyways. However, programming one is quite easy. If I can write one on a $100 calculator, it can be done on a much fancier computer after I spend as much time learning the language on the computer as I did on my calc.
}
case Infonaut.issarcastic == false {
You're nuts if you don't appreciate the visual interface. Although the command line is fast in issuing commands to your computer, text isn't as efficient for us to comprehend as images. Just because our ideas are almost always expressed through linguistics doesn't mean we have evolved to do it faster than visuals and other non-linguistic means. "Bird chirping" doesn't tell us things that hearing the bird chirp can tell us in the same amount of time. What type of bird is it? Is it friendly? Is it hungry? "Painting of woman" isn't the same as seeing the Mona Lisa.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
I thought it was Newton that had the Apple fall on him.
Just like that wonderful little PDA, I think Darwin is going to go the way of Newton, and Apple will just fall on it, a victim of their own buzz-word surfing.
----
Steve Jobs...than boost the real underdog, the open source effort behind Darwin.
If anyone thinks that Apple's going to do all of Darwin's developing, they either have not been paying attention or are severely deluded. A few notable non-Apple employees have been working on many useful things (/dev/random -- yay!), but the list of Stuff That Needs Doing remains long. Many of these list items aren't anywhere near the top of Apple's list of OS X features -- support for older Power Macs, for example -- so Darwin will have to do without unless an enterprising and energetic outsider steps up.
This whole concept disturbs me. How is it the 'community' should feel bad or somehow 'guilty' that they are not completing the to-do's and building PowerMac support? I recognize their are unique features to Darwin (Mach) but basically it is little more outside of what the BSDs offer already (I am willing to consider that I may be wrong - Darwin _may_ have involved alot of work by Apple & they may have really given the BSDs 'something' - Im not that 'up' on OSX exactly.. but try and understand my point from inital impressions). Why is it the responsibility of the community to build a stable foundation on which OSX can be sold? We must embrace Darwin and make it better?
The way I see it: OSX's most exciting parts are the GUI. Why must the OpenSource movement do the 'support' coding of Darwin while Apple keeps the GUI closed Source? Why would the OpenSource movement enable Apple to sell their Mac OSX when they arent really working in good faith? Apple isnt really interested in enabling extensive porting of OSX - Apple is only going to be selling OSX on Apple boxen and arent interested in OSX running on anything else. Another key ingredient to the 'OpenSource' movement is that we share with developers who work on other than Intel. Like most people here, I would love a new Cube or G4 - but they are too damned expensive (in pure harware spec per $ kind of analysis vs the clones we all build)... What is APPLE offering people? This whole article leaves a bad taste in my mouth - here is Apple (or someone speaking in their interest) saying "Why arent you guys helping us build Darwin?" my reply "Cut the price of your hardware in half (or make it somehow more reasonable) - pay your own developers to port OSX to Intel - and start the OSX League, democratically elect the board, provide some grants/funding"
The OpenSource movement is beginning to look like it may provide a method for proprietary types to subsiize their development costs - without being honest. IBM and RedHat are good examples of companies that I love to support because I think they 'play fair'.
1) The Intel bootloader isn't out yet. Most open source developers use PCs, go figure. You can bend over backwards to run Darwintel but you'll also need an Intel ethernet card. The vast majority of Darwin developers are running OS X.
.tar.gz and often in source only. When the package system is finished at www.openpackages.org Darwin will be a lot easier to deal with.
2) No package system. Darwin doesn't have anything resembling ports or dpkg or whatever. Everything is being distributed in
3) Apple botched the first release. There was nothing to be gained from a Darwin 0.3 release. Also their first ASPL wasn't clear enough. That's fixed now but first impressions are lasting.
---
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
The hell you say. In the lab I work in at my university, there is a G3 and two iMacs, while I have my IBM Thinkpad with linux installed. The G3 is slooow and unstable. It crashes quite often. One of the iMacs has a PARTICULAR stability bug inspite of it having the same software and hardware as the second iMac. Both are prone to lockups (they are updated on MacOS). We have almost a weekly visit from someone on the university IT staff, checking to see if we are having any problems for that week. About 30% of the time, we are but inspite of repeated attempts on their part, the problems remain.
Meanwhile, me on my lowly ThinkPad with linux never crashes. The only problem I have had with it was setting an incorrect hdparm flag, easily corrected, which played hell with booting.
My stepdaughter has an older Mac, a Performa, at home. I have my homebuilt Athlon with linux. She does practically NOTHING with her computer but do wordprocessing now and again, or a little web browsing. You'd think there would NEVER be a problem with that, especially since she just leaves well enough alone. Nope. With her doing NOTHING to dork up that Performa, it occassionally dorks itself up and it is I who must fix it. The only problems I EVER run into with my box are self-inflicted with my constant experimentation and tweaking. When I leave it all alone, problems simply do not exist...ever.
On a certain aspect of your statement I would say you are correct, but then the same holds true on all the homebuilts I have ever had (4). The HARDWARE rarely croaks. The problems are ALWAYS software/OS-related. I would think that OS-X will get beyond typical Apple software/OS problems seeing as how it is built on a rock-solid, ABSOLUTELY trustworthy unix foundation, which means that new Macs with OS-X on them will be as stable as my homebuilts and my laptop...but the hardware, like ALL hardware, will remain a rare source of problem (I have had ONE cdrom croak on me in the history of computers and one 14" monitor from long-ago. ONE cdrom, ONE monitor. Nothing else...although my present old 15" monitor is slowly giving up the ghost, like any monitor will do after a long enough period of time, even an Mac monitor - I've seen that happen twice two in my time with them).
On the whole, I would say you will "get the chicks" on Macs by having to CONSTANTLY fix their stability issues/software issues, and with OS-X, the settings will remain a mystery with the bulk of the great unwashed (male and female alike). So I would say your ability to "get the girls" remains as unchanged on the Mac as it is on the PC-side. There is ALWAYS the need by ignorant users for someone with a computer clue to help them get past their errors or their ignorance or the bad design decisions made by companies like M$ and Apple (with their pre-OS-X/Darwin Crapple MacOS). Fear not for your "love life". People still have problem programming their VCR and you think they will be able to setup networking?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I say....let's gloat.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
The point the article is making, though, is that the Open Source community, for the most part, isn't really doing that much with Darwin. Yes, OS X may end up sucking as much as (insert your least favorite OS here), but the sad thing here is that the culprit of the bad OS would not be the closed-source, corporate controlled GUI, but rather the Open Source, everybody take a look BSD core. The author of the article spends a good deal of time scratching his head, wondering when the "community" is going to actually start contributing seriously to Darwin.
Now if, as you have speculated, OS X turns out to be a massive failure because Darwin wasn't up to snuff, which camp ends up the worse for the wear: the corporate GUI folks who managed to put together a more-or-less solid user interface; or the Open Source community, that basically ignored an entire operating system for whatever reason? Sure, there's no mandate for anybody to look at the code, much less contribute to it, but rest assured that if Darwin ends up being the downfall of OS X, the Apple spin team will be itching to find somebody to pin it on. Three guesses as to what they might say...
All that said, I'm still itching to see what Apple releases next year. I absolutely loved NeXT, and I'm hoping that OS X takes off like a rocket.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Well, you are making my point: if something isn't easy enough to try, people won't bother. Linux provided enough functionality and advantages over alternatives for early adopters to get to the point where easy-to-install distributions got created and it became useful to many more people. Darwin seems to still have to cross that threshold.
I am saddened if you can't even install a *nix OS without a wonderful graphical install program.
That would be sad, indeed. Fortunately, I can assure you that that's not a problem: I have manually entered boot loaders in machine code and installed 4.1BSD from tape. But, these days, IMO, a reasonably mature system should come with some kind of installer, just like it comes with a lot of other things that systems didn't use to come with.
1) Darwin is more organized from top to bottom. From drivers to solving the /etc/ chaos
2) Darwin is a macrokernel with less maintenance. No module recompiling.
3) Bundles bundles bundles
4) Potentially faster than FreeBSD
5) Automatic kext loading
6) NetInfo
7) IOKit driver architecture
8) More flexible BSD-like license
9) Corporate support
10) Mach-O binaries. dyld memory use efficiency. FAT binaries
Windows is shit.
Linux becomes less an underdog as the linux community grows. If the community abandons it, wont it remain the underdog?
The article was pointless. OSS is bout a market model and the maturation of the current software market, not about an OS, and I use Linux because I find it useful, not because I am a fanatic. (OK maybe I am a fanatic, but only because I find it useful...)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Vote for your favorite OSS project:
O <--- Linux
Darwin ---> O
O <--- xBSD
Gnu/HURD ---> O
O <--- XFree86
Apache ---> O
O <--- Perl
BIND ---> O
O <--- Sendmail
Voting ends at 7PM EST and results should be tabulated no later than 7AM the next day.
NOTE: 'Dimpled' chad does NOT count.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What the hell are you talking about? Apple licenced One-Click from Amazon for use in the Apple Store. That's it. If it's a worthless patent (I think it is), then Apple (presumably) paid Amazon for something worthless. It has nothing to do with what you use Darwin for.
So if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X" :-)
And it's been what, 5-10 years, that work on GNUStep has been going on? How far along is it? Can it do any of the things which separate Mac OS X from NextStep? Will it ever?
I'm not sure how to get this through your pointy little head, but I'll try: Darwin isn't intended as a Linux/[Free|Open|Net]BSD replacement. It's simply the ultimate documentation for the low levels of Mac OS X. If it helps people write better device drivers for Mac OS X, it's a huge win for Apple. If someone can catch a bug in the OS, it's a great thing for everyone. If it lets people run Mac OS X on older hardware, it's a win for customers who don't want to buy new Macs. Intel support might serve as Apple's escape hatch from Motorola's incompetence, but that's still up in the air.
The political rationalle behind "free" software doesn't really enter into Apple's reasons for releasing Darwin, so don't look for one, or even complain about Darwin not being free enough to satisfy you.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
This brings to question - MAC OS/X is aimed at the server market
Really? Who said that? It's certainly wasn't Apple. Oh, wait maybe you mean Mac OS X Server, which is currently an entirely different product. And furthermore, Mac OS X Server is aimed at the Mac server admin. It's not going up against Solaris.
This also rises another question - whats with this "Lets make unix idiot proof so all the stupid people can use it."
What do you mean "what's with" it? It's a good idea. And just because you don't know about ifconfig doesn't mean you're stoopid. Why should people be forced to deal with that stuff if they don't want to?
KDE anyone?
If you honestly think KDE and Mac OS X are equivalent in terms of concept and technology, you need to do more research.
Sorry to bust all the redhat users' bubbles but unix will NEVER be suitable for the desktop.
You'd better actually try Mac OS X before you say that again.
Microsoft and its programmers own the desktop till the end of time.
First, this is a silly statemnt, but secondly, this has nothing to do with Unix being suitable for the desktop. I think you're mixing up cause and effect.
Why, oh why, do I insist on responding to AC flamebait?
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Keep in mind, people: Apple is not trying to make Darwin yet another Linux/BSD/Whatever competitor. Apple open-sourced the lower layers of the OS, to make life easier for Macintosh developers.
Before this, back in the NeXT days, getting kernal source was like pulling teeth, and a lot of us needed it. Now, we can read it anytime, modify it if it's broken, and get our mods into the main development tree.
Darwin is a Mac thing. It's not a Free Software Community thing, and it's not supposed to be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't suppose that Apple needs to give away the source to OS X to
get the support of the open source community: instead providing
support and commitment for the equivalent of WINE for OS X on a free
software platform (Linux and/or BSD) would be enough. This would do a
lot to get support for the platform from the OS cumminty. Check out
this article by Jordan Hubbard on why Apple might want to do this
(though Jordan advocates Apple actually opening up the source).
And, let's figure, who doesn't?
Wasn't apple that company that bought rights to the one-click shopping "patent" from Amazon.com, and showed they were even proud of that? (Actually this is a rhetorical question, never bother replying "yes, they were".) So if you own anything of a Website with a shopping interface which is just a little bit too easy, you can't use Darwin. Sucks, right?
So I don't give for MacOS X, and I think that anyone who codes for MacOS X in his spare time isn't helping out anybody but Apple. Apple owns this code. No-one (and then again, everyone) owns Free Software.
If you think that the MacOS concepts are cool, you'd be glad to hear that they are modeled after the open OpenStep standard. And if you want to work on a Free OpenStep implementation, go work on GNUStep.
Yes, there are differences with MacOS X (and NextStep):
- Binary incompatibility (due to compiler issues and to undocumented resource file formats in the OpenStep specification)
- Works on top of the X Window System instead of its own graphics thingies
- Follows the NextStep look & feel
- Not Out Of Beta Yet (doh, the only NS implementation that
;-)
However, this particular implementation is Free so you can modify it any way you want, keep your modifications private when you only use it yourself, and there is no single instance that can demand strange things for you. Making GNUStep appear like MacOS X might even be considered a doable task (though I don't intend to say it's simple), though walking away from X must be much harder. And anyone can help getting this stuff Out Of Beta.- is
Out Of Beta is Out Of Print as wellSo if you want to develop a Free MacOS X, GNUStep is a really good place to start from. I simply hope that by the time MacOS X is released, the headlines will look like "GNUStep: a better MacOS X than MacOS X" :-)
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
If I offended you with that Windows ME reference, leave this site immediately.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
What made me pick up Linux in 1994 was the fact that it came as a complete distribution, pretty much ready to install and run. Those distributions had a number of limitations when it came to drivers and tools, but they were usable and could be used to solve specific problems.
I haven't been able to find a complete distribution for the PC based on the Darwin kernel. Such a distribution would require the kernel, the command line utilities, development tools, X11, and at least one desktop (Gnome, KDE, GNUStep, ...). Such a distribution would be useful even if the set of available drivers is pretty limited (IDE, maybe a SCSI card, a couple of common Ethernet cards).
This article, Open-sourcing the Apple, has a different point of view on the subject.
If you travel in geek circles, by now you have no doubt heard about Apple's beta release of OS X, a wholly new operating system for the Macintosh. That's especially true if you are a member of that subset of geeks who closely follow open-source software issues.
OS X is a much anticipated amalgam of the Mach 3.0 microkernel from Carnegie-Mellon University, and FreeBSD 3.2, a more traditional open-source Unix-compatible operating system from the FreeBSD Project. But knowing that OS X is a microkernel wrapped up in a Unix OS, which is in turn wrapped up in a whole new layer of graphical user interface (GUI) technology, doesn't tell the whole story. Is OS X just another fancy GUI-based operating desktop system like Windows or is it a more industrially useful server-centric operating system like FreeBSD or Linux-based OS's? Crafting user interfaces is Apple's widely acknowledged forte; FreeBSD technology is known to power major Internet sites like Yahoo and Sony Japan. So which is it?
Or is it both? It is possible for one operating system to satisfy both the needs of someone like myself, a FreeBSD developer who expects a lot of power and flexibility from an operating system, and the average user who just wants to point and click?
( read more)
I would guess that a lot of the reason the OSS community isn't putting a lot of effort is the "schism" between OSX beta and Darwin mentioned by Somogyi. If there's a two month delay between releasing OSX beta and the equivalent Darwin, then there's two months of work that's happened at Apple that isn't in the current Darwin.
How much effort would you put into fixing two-month-old code that you knew a large group of people were modifying daily?
...but not many people use the whole thing. Darwin Streaming Server is a top notch streaming media element, and is out for FreeBSD, Red Hat, Solaris, and Win NT/2k, as well as the source code. It also includes a proxy, so that you can configure your server as desired. It's equivalent to the QuickTime streaming server for OS X. As it becomes used, there will probably be patchs for each operating system, and it's development will parallel the QuickTime development for OS X.
e aming/
w in/
. html
http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/str
Darwin 2.1 is the core of OS X, and it's been released in segments, so developers can concentrate on the aspect of darwin they want to tweak, and maintain compatability with the main release.
http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/dar
All in all, there are many possibilites, but for the average hacker, the resources to get a G3 or a G4 to test the software out are probably lacking. As for the intel release, it's being worked on. The current version of Darwin can be tweaked to run on an intel, and there are details here:
http://www.publicsource.apple.com/projects/mail
this is also addressed in the FAQ.
Let's see. Darwin lacks all Quartz, Aqua, the OO API, and all of the nifty features in OSX, and in return, it uses an antiquated microkernel (mach) and runs FreeBSD in user space.
A) It's an ugly hack.
B) Its slower than straight FreeBSD.
C) It offer absolutely no advantage over FreeBSD in terms of anything. Not even stability, since BSD runs in kernel space anyway.
Why SHOULD anyone pay attention to Darwin, given its total lack of salient features?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I've heard that Darwin boots on Intel, and I'd love to check it out for myself, but I haven't been able to actually find any way of doing it. Anybody here been able to get it working? If so, how?
If you're interested in seeing Apple pursue this further, make sure to check out the OSX on Intel petition. Also, read the Register article about rumors that Apple is actually porting OSX to Intel, and their article about Apple's recent Darwin update.
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
First on the list, I suspect, would be...
'When is Quicktime player components going to be open sourced?'
I don't think that's going to happen, any time soon. For those people who want it as a matter of convenience (do everything in Linux!), that's all it is, a convenience.
For those who would need the Quicktime functionality... I guess it's too bad. For each OS their respective strengths, and movie/audio/media happens to be an Apple thing.
For those who would want that codecs for tinkering/development purposes... isn't that what Vorbis is all about?
'When are you going to port Aqua to the Intel world?'
We have, but since we don't make Intel/AMD branded hardware, we won't be selling the software. We would get millions in sales, as a secure, stable, BSD based Intel-platform OS, without any sales of hardware(currently), which means the only revenue model we could pursue would be updates and upgrades to the OS... Therefore shortchanging the R&D and development innovations of a floppy-less iMac, the FireWire enabled devices, the Airport capable systems, the long-battery life portables, the fanless designs, etc.
'How about your PDA plans?'
We are currently researching and developing a PDA strategy.
Now that those questions are out of the way... Hopefully more interesting philosophical/technical/social questions can be asked.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
I feel that one of the strongest points of Darwin that everyone is really overlooking is the Bundle system, a directory that groups together all the associated files of an application (and which abstracts out this directory *as* the application). This is a system far superior to the way that windows or any linux/RPM deals with the question of "what constitutes a packaged application?". If you have a centralized database such into which app information is installed (such as the RPM database or windows registry) and there is no metadata or anything else from which a new database can be rebuilt, you end up with a techsupport nightmare. The centralized database could (and usually does) get hosed and (re)(de)installing an application is difficult if not impossible. The bundle system presents a far more robust solution, since all files associated with an app are kept together in a directory and not just in a single, fragile, non-rebuildable database. The bundle system could dramatically reduce the TCO that windows incurs through the registry (probably at the cost I/O efficiency), something the corporate world would find attractive (if the dumb bastards actually looked at TCO when making purchasing decisions). Linux should scrap RPM/Deb altogether and simply go with Bundles.
Right here.
;)
That should get you started.