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?

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[ch-chuck]

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.

Re:(Yeah, well..) Darwin != Free, GNUStep is

[TWR]

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?

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

Do you even know what Mac OS X is?

[TheInternet]

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

What Darwin is FOR.

[jcr]

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

Apple and open source

[Chalst]

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).

(Yeah, well..) Darwin != Free, GNUStep is

[Pflipp]

Darwin is covered by the Apple Public Source License, to which the Free Software Foundation has dedicated a whole page, and that's not because they like it. The OSI had been very mistaking in calling this stuff "Open Source". Remember that such an Apple license can be retracted any time you have a patent conflict with Apple.

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
  • is
  Out Of Beta is Out Of Print as well ;-)

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.

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" :-)

It's... It's...

It's in the woodwork

[bonzoesc]

Darwin, to most corporates, would seem to be something that takes care of itself. They believe that the really showy stuff is more difficult than making the plumbing behind the scenes work, whereas any half-decent programmer knows that they can make the pretty fountain shoot however they want as long as the pipes are straight. Instead of releasing a working OS like (insert favorite OS here), they're going to end up releasing Windows ME.

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

Re:It's in the woodwork

[IntlHarvester]

That's assuming that Darwin is really targeted at the Open Sourcers to begin with. My thought was that primary goal of Apple's Darwin strategy was to provide the best damn device driver documentation possible in order to remove what could be a huge upgrade hinderence (see Win 98's ability to load SCSI drivers from '88, and MS's two fork OS strategy going on seemingly forever)

But then, you read things like this:

Part of the problem is also that Darwin's infrastructure is still incomplete. IOKit, Darwin/Mac OS X's whizzy new driver scheme, is still missing such esoterica as basic PC Card support, which explains why there is no Airport driver in the Public Beta

And you wonder, What exactly does Apple need? Would any kernel hacking on Darwing just get in the way of Apple or be irrelevent as soon as Apple gets done? Or is Apple waiting for 'the community' to come up with stuff like Powerbook support that Apple has already promised long ago.

So, is there any roadmap? Have they advertised for help in any department (except x86, which is obviously a lower priority to them)? Is there any development infrastructure besides a mailing list (see Mozilla's array of bugtracker, newsgroups, CVS, daily builds, docs, and so on.) I don't know the answers, but if they want more people to become interested, those are obvious places to start.

There's lots of capable hackers in the Mac community, but outside of commercial hardware companies that write device drivers, I can understand why Darwin-level infrastructure isn't all that interesting. It's a desktop OS, and the user interest (and shareware $) will always be in GUI tweaks and user utilities. Nobody's really going to care about NFS performance or mounting 200 different filesystems or whatever Linux-kernel people are worried about. And the consumer version won't even have a term window, so forget about classic Unix userspace stuff.
--

Is there a distribution for the PC?

[q000921]

I would very much like to give Darwin a try, but it seems like it's still too hard.

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).

Another point of view

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Why no-one's working on it....

[aktbar]

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?

PARTS of darwin are useful...

[Artemis Entreri]

...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.

http://www.publicsource.apple.com//projects/stre aming/

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/darw in/

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. html

this is also addressed in the FAQ.

Why bother?

[be-fan]

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?

Darwin on Intel?

[levendis]

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.

Host an 'Ask Apple' thread?

[2nd Post!]

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!

Bundles should get more attention

[Ukab the Great]

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.

Darwin on Intel!

[table and chair]

Right here.


That should get you started. ;)