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Jordan Hubbard (of FreeBSD Fame) Hired by Apple
Anonymous Coward and many others wrote in to tell us that Jordan Hubbard is going to work for Apple.
Here's his post to the FreeBSD-announce mail list.
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It's bunk. The details of the agreement in light of the legal issues MS was facing, the patent disputes between the MS and Apple, and the favors between the two make it darn clear it was a mutually accepted and beneficial deal to them. Know what? It was and worked damn well. Apple got an influx of cash and a boost to its stock, got what ended up being the main browser ported to its platform, the dominant office suite, and avoided a potential drain from patent disputes with MS. MS got PR, money from the sales of software, attempted (but failed badly) avoid monopoly issues, and a financial hit from potentially losing to Apple on certain patents.
The investment is clearly non-voting stock. MS cannot and does not influence Apple with it. Stating as such is absolutely ludicrous and incredibly naive. In the computer industry, EVERYONE has money. No one gives a rat's ass what Ellison thinks because of his cash. His influence, like MSs over Apple, lies in what platform the software runs. If MS is pulling Apple's strings, it's not money. Apple has a $4 billion cash reserve. It would have been threatening to stop developing Office or Explorer on the Mac platform.
As your Mac coworkers know, and you clearly don't, MacOS X does not run on x86. Darwin does, OpenStep does, MacOS X probably could, but right now, it does not.
And the reason it does not and WILL not has nothing to do with MS. MS's currently plans are to infiltrate ALL platforms by providing services that are OS independent. .NET. If the Mac base uses their software more, MS wins.
The reason Apple will not do it is because they are a hardware company. Their claim to fame is their OS and GUI, but they make their money moving hardware. If they didn't, they'd be another Be. Now, why would Apple port MacOS X? That takes time, resources. Then you have to support all the crappy x86 hardware out there, and you know what I mean even if you are an x86 proponent--I wouldn't have bought an EpOX-branded board 4 years ago for a workstation machine or an ECS board today. Then there's the tech support.
Just to sell software at $120 a box? And then run in with the price wars between Compaq, Dell, and Gateway in the workstation and server market, reducing hardware profits to close to nil? That would reduce their cash flow, reduce R&D, and with the reduction in R&D related to hardware, a reduction in the design of signature Mac hardware--iow, company branding and trademark dress would take a huge hit.
Forget it. The x86 port won't happen for the masses. The ONLY way is they struck a deal with AMD and Tyan to make SMP Athlon 4s using 760MP and tried to go into the server market. And that's a slim chance given that they'd have an easier time just porting MacOS X server code to IBM's PPC-based mainframes, like the Power4.
*Not* *going* *to* *happen*.
Oh, btw, I use a Mac. And while we're whipping them out, I'd pit my Mac coworkers against your PC coworkers in a coding fest and bet some serious cash on my boys and girls.
Don't you know??? This troll that keeps popoing up is a ploy of the *BSD word. You see, since nobody is (apparently [due to the flawed statistics]) it seems really 1337 to all of the Mandrake(TM), RedHat(TM), etc. etc. Linux using newbies out there. They decide to try it, and possibly may get hooked on it, do something with it, or use it just to appear to be 1337. I'm not dissing in any linux or FreeBSD, *BSD, or whatever, becase I use them, and they do what I want. I'm just presenting my paranoid thoery.
Apple is already giving back to the community. Although you might not like it, Darwin is a port of FreesBSD etc to the PowerPC architecture, which didn't exist before Apple got into Darwin. They are just playing a win-win strategy on this: W Sanchez contributed back things on several projects (BSD or GPL ones) both as a developer and as an Apple employee.
Jordan Hubbard will not work on MacOS X. Read the lines: he'll be manager of BSD technologies. So he won't work on a port of MacOS X to x86 (silly idea), he won't work on bringing aqua to Sun Solaris, he won't work on anything that's not BSD related, or shouldn't.
Apple had a good experience when they hired W Sanchez. His departure to the nice world of start ups and VC has left a big hole in the relationship between Apple and Open Source. See the comments from mac users and creators at latest machack regarding Apple's opportunity to leverage the open source movement. Their in-house comment is 'Apple's going to have difficulties to make things work'. They need someone with some strong ties to the community to evolve and keep sound relations.
Talking again about W Sanchez, see his comments regarding his time at Apple on his advocado page. He's been happy there because he's both worked on a great in-house project and continued working on Apache etc.
Among the stupidest things I've read here: Apple will not port OS X to x86, first things first and the first for them is to have a nice OS on their computers. Apple did not port Darwin to x86, others did, Apple merely said: 'that's nice, let's add a link for that somewhere'. Jordan is selling his soul -> hey no he's a developer working on BSD, it's just another company. Athlons are better than G4 -> well the Rolls Royce engine is better than the porsche engine.
One sure thing: all the relations Apple is trying to have with the Open Source community is an issue they have to take with care, otherwise another FUD war is going to spread against Apple, you know something like 'Open Source is endangering Apple' or 'Apple is stealing efforts from the Open Source community'. Both of which are so silly I wouldn't care to comment.
I was as skeptical as anyone in the beginning regarding OS X... however, having started in computing with the Apple II line and only grudgingly moved over to the PC platform, I'd always hoped Apple would rise again to take over the world :-)
And I think they have a chance with OS X...
First off, the new iBook (the one released this year, not the George Foreman grill of generations past) is a slick piece of equipment. Actual ethernet jack, no dongles (aside from video outputs), built-in 802.11, and a battery life that actually surpasses 4 hours getting work done and listening to mp3's in OS X. Best part? IT'S COMPETITIVELY PRICED! I never thought I'd ever accuse Apple of pricing hardware competitively, but they did it. Base price is $1299.
Secondly, OS X is quite slick... it's unstable in parts (there's a couple rough edges here and there, and the stock e-mail client... well, I don't think it's designed for how much mail I get), but the core OS has only needed rebooting once (due to an NFS problem -- if an NFS issue bringing a system to its knees isn't a sign of a true unix, I don't know what is). This is on a laptop. Sleep mode works flawlessly, and the system wakes up within about 3 seconds. Moving between home and work (both with DHCP) involves no thought oncesoever... just plug the cable in, and everything's happy. New hardware? Plug it in. It'll probably work without any input oncesoever.
OS 9 emulation works fairly well... the Classic environment (where OS 9 apps run) takes awhile to load, but once it's running, it's just there and mostly swaps out. This is necessary for viewing PDF's, using SimpleText, and a couple other things still, but new OS X stuff is coming out frequently.
And, if that's not enough, I actually had a chick say "that's a beautiful thing" while I had it open and operational... I AM NOT JOKING! A CHICK ACTUALLY COMPLEMENTED MY NEW UNIX BOX!
Truly, this is a wonderful thing. All these years, THIS is what I've wanted Linux to be... and here Apple goes and does it. Check it out.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an Anonymous Coward 'cuz I'm too lazy to create an account, not because I work for Apple or something like that. I work for an ISP. I do network stuff. Chicks usually don't talk to me. Probably because I'm too lazy to create an account.
Indeed. http://emacs-on-aqua.sourceforge.net./
Largest Unix vendor?
AAPL market cap: 8.373B
SUNW market cap: 48.982B
IBM market cap: 195.7B
"Largest vendor of x" is always a contestable number, regardless of what x is. For a long time, people claiming Microsoft did not have monopoly power (including the company's own spokecritters) would point at IBM's vast software projects and explain that IBM was a much bigger software firm and thus, MS couldn't have monopoly power. Numbers on the desktop would tell a different picture.
Units shipped is an interesting measure; you'll note IDG and Gartner are currently squabbling over Linux metrics because there's no way of mapping installtions to shipped units.
It would seem to me that if you bloated Mac OS and added lots of fancy applications that load all sorts of extensions and gave it away for free, you could sell a lot more hardware after poor unsuspecting users "upgrade" and realize after a time that their computers seem sort of slow.
Of course, that's just the sneaky evil person inside me talking.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
As far as I can tell from Mr. Hubbard's post, he is not stopping his work on FreeBSD, so his presence on the FreeBSD team *won't* be missed.
Transmeta didn't! Their stock price has plunged since they realized they had to distribute a copy of the design plans for the CPU's along with every one sold. The clone makers in Taiwan have been having a field day. ;-)
he was right- darwin, not macos. emacs isn't in the kernel, is it?
Apple = Great Hardware? What planet are you on?
I've got a G4, 512 MB RAM with all the fixin's and OS 9. It gathers dust.
On the other side of the room is a Pentium 300 system with 128 MB running Redhat 6.2. It is my daily desktop.
The G4, with it's hockey puck, God Aweful, one-eyed mouse and positively horrible keyboard, guarantee it won't get used. No need to even get down to the idiot MacOS (I'm sorry, I have to tell the OS how much memory to give an application when I have 400 MB free? WHAT?).
The only good things about the Mac these days is one can run Linux on it.
Since that G4 isn't being used, why don't you sell it to me?
This would be more trouble than you can imagine. You would have to have a second verison of OS X just to run on the x86. Then you would need two diffrent versions of all the software. Unless of course they build some emulation in, but that would suck.
In the end you would have nothing but a bunch of confused users who would have to look *really* close when buying software.
http://www.xpurple.com
Who honestly cares OS X it's FreeBSD based or not, it's BSD based, and JKH is going to be working on it, or if not, he will be working closely with others who are working on OS X. The result will be, either way, OS X will be more LIKE FreeBSD at it's core. Which makes me worry more about something else, Specifically:
JKH Wrote "FreeBSD doesn't compete with Apple's product offerings in any way and provides an excellent source of technology for them.."
In other words, Apple will allow FreeBSD to exist as a separate OS maintained by JKH, but it's not ever going to be something that challenges OS X.
WHY? Are Apple and JKH both agreeing that OS X has a nice GUI front that makes it the perfect OS for non-technical people? Or do Apple and JKH both agreeing that OS X is going to be the killer OS that brings Apple into the small scale server market? Either of which would make FreeBSD not a real OS for either?
I'm bothered by what JKH said, but then again, I'm usually paranoid and take things out of context...
Wind River isns't a small company: 1.4billion market cap, 2000 employees. I bet they compensate well, including insurance.
I remember a time when Jordan Hubbard didn't need an introduction here on slashdot. Oh well.
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
How can a part of FreeBSD not be a part of BSD?
That's Jordan, not Jonathan, and the project will survive just fine. Jordan is one of approximately 250 committers on the FreeBSD project, programmers who are allowed to directly check in changes to the source code. He is also one of the 9 members of the Core Team, the group assigned to be roughly the supreme court of the FreeBSD project. Both bodies are large enough to run adequately with one member down, even one as active as Jordan.
If Jordan finds himself too busy to fully contribute to the Core Team, I would expect him to say so and step aside; he is certainly one of the most honest men I've ever met. In the first election for the FreeBSD Core Team held last fall, Jordan was one of the few members of the original Core Team members maintained by the voters, so his popularity among the FreeBSD project is not in doubt.
Rest assured that the FreeBSD project has not allowed itself to suffer from the "what happens if Linus gets hit by a bus" problem, unlike our friends in the Linux community. Our transition of power is assured, unless all of the committers scattered around the globe and all existing copies of the CVS archives -- several million by now -- were to be destroyed simultaneously.
Apple will not be porting the Mac OS to x86 for the same reason that Steve Jobs won't allow the smallest bit of GPLed code into Darwin. It would put Apple out of business.
./Applications/Chess.app/Contents/Resources/COPYIN G
./usr/share/emacs/20.7/etc/COPYING
That's bullshit, and as half-witted as can be expected from a Wintel multibooter.
Eat this:
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
While Sun has a higher market cap than Apple, if you base the comparison on the number of Unix boxes these companies are projected to ship in the next 12 months, Apple is the largest Unix vendor, hands down.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
When you install OS X, you automatically get a full installation of Mac OS 9.1 as well. Both of these OSes have very friendly, polished GUI tools that let you select the other OS as the default OS for subsequent reboots.
So when you say "downgrade" to OS 9, it's much less of a big deal than the word implies.
I use Windows much more than my Mac (forced to by employer), and I still haven't figured out how to make my Dell dual-boot into two different OSes. I could probably do it after two or three hours of research.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Except that Darwin is actually based on NeXTStep in whatever state it was when Apple bought NeXT, which is effectively 4.2BSD with some graphical add-ons.
The only relation FreeBSD 3.2 bears to the OS which Apple acquired via NeXTStep is that it comes from 4.xBSD way back when and has been updated in similar ways.
That said, NeXTStep is painfully out of date in some basic, security relevant ways (I have a NeXT 040 turbo cube running NeXTStep 3.3 sitting to my left and completely hidden behind ipf and ipnat on my NetBSD/i386 machine, so I'd say that yes, I am qualified to speak about it, thanks). So the chances that FreeBSD was used as a reference platform for dragging NeXStep into preparedness for the present-day Internet is not an unreasonable assumption, though I don't know the details of that myself.
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Do you have a
Yes, it went something like this: you don't release Mac OS for x86 and nobody gets hurt.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Well, specifically x86 -- as in, Intel architecture. It's pretty much taken for granted that i386 == x86 == Intel architecture.
Jason.
Will Mac OS X ever be released for i386? I heard rumors that Apple had some sort of agreement with MS that it wouldn't invade i386 territory. Is there any truth to this? I can see Apple wanting to keep Mac OS X as an incentive to buy Mac hardware. But I think offering OS X for i386 will help OS X approach ubiquity and can only help the sale of Mac hardware indirectly.
So what's the bottom line? Anyone know the inside scoop?
Jason.
One of the kewl things about Java w/ Swing on MacOS X is that the applications look & behave as if they were any other MacOS X application - no off-look, no odd limitations. Apple has managed to pull off a Java+other-bits implementation that really integrates Java, far more then on other patforms.
That Apple is looking to Java to open up lots of cross-platform opportunities is no secret, but their success hasn't yet been widely noticed. BTW, one of the weird bits is that much of the Java GUI stuff is already hardware accelerated where the Aqua stuff isn't yet - stange to see Java sometimes display faster then the native!
Finally, this strategy is already having payoffs. Apple has yet to port their Airport configuration software to MacOS X, rather pointing folks to the Java implementation already made for other platforms. Why port their native stuff when a universal implementation works and can be standardized upon.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
For those already posting wild-assed assumptions (like it would kill these folks to look up their own answers - this is the web!) here's a couple of responses bundled up:
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FreeBSD is *not* the basis of MacOS X. The kernel is different and the utilities are a hodgepodge from a number of BSD distribs.
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Darwin is the MacOS X core and it's freely available. Indeed Apple has ported it to x86 (a platform they don't sell) and provides it the same support they do their PPC implementation. It's Open Source, go grab a copy for yourself.
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Darwin is the core of MacOS X - it's NOT all of it. The Classic, Carbon, Quartz, QuickTime, etc. parts remain in house & aren't likely to be released. Some folks whinge on about Apple taking advantage of Open Source - well yeah, that's why folks used the licenses they did. On the other hand Apple's also been contributing back a lot too (unlike MS) and while they may not have released your favorite bits they've been playing fairly.
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Yes Apple has rabid lawyers when it gets to things that involve their name & IP, especially their "look". Sure imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, on the other hand they spenty a lot developing their look & it's their trade dress.
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There is no "secret agreement" between Apple & MS regarding using x86 (at least that anyone seriously believes.) MS makes good money off of their MacOS products and wouldn't likely be strongly impacted by Apple using x86. On the other hand Apple is very unlikely to do so for a long list of reasons. Finally any such agreement would get MS in to too much hot water.
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Porting BSD tools to MacOS X varies in difficulty. For simple command-line stuff it's pretty straightforward, indeed lots of stuff makes just fine already. On the other hand taking advantage of MacOS X's Cocoa OO environment with it's "services", "frameworks", "packages" and other nifty stuff takes a bit more work.
- For ports that do GUI there's some work involved in going from X to Quartz but it's entirely doable. X-under-Aqua is available but it's kinda missing the point of running MacOS in the first place. Java-stuff of course runs natively, uses the Aqua GUI via Swing.
What's Hubbard likely to do? There's a spot open for managing the Darwin porting. There's lots of BSD-harmonizing to do. Many parts of MacOS X are still being tuned so any help there is likely to be appreciated. There's also been a push to make MacOS X Server shine so that's also a likely source of work. Finally there's just basic evangelizing and developer relations.I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
The numbers are interesting in their own right, however, since it shows that Sun is a larger company and it could be argued that therefore Apple isn't the largest Unix vendor.
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You do understand that Emacs is no more a part of Darwin than Internet Explorer, right? You are capable of distinguishing between the operating system and applications that can run on it, right?
Running Apple software doesn't automatically grant you wisdom, knowledge, and insight any more than not running it denies you such things.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
I don't know... the mainstream press sure spent a lot of time covering George W. Bush's job change.
It does no such thing. It states that the copyright notice in the code has to be preserved. Big deal, when it's a closed source project. Any company is free to take your BSD-licensed code, enclose it in a closed-source project and call it their own. That is explicitly allowed by the license and BSD license enthusiasts give this ability to pirate code as the main benefit of the BSD license. In practical terms, the BSD license is meaningless. It gives the author no useful rights regarding his code. The BSD license is a fig leaf for public domain code.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
I'd love to see an Aqua xemacs that could use the gorgeous Quartz font rendering instead of the usual hideous X fonts.
I tried Tenon Xtools, and it sort of worked (there were enough issues it was actually barely usable), but what it did more than anything is taunt me. "Aqua has pretty fonts and you can't use them! See these utterly horrid fonts! Ha Ha!".
Anyone know if such a project is being worked on?
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The world would surely be a more attractive, sleeker and stylish place. And it would be a more expensive one; Jobs' signature product is the Cube hooked up to a 22" Cinema Display: The $4,500 PC (down from $5,700 at introduction).
I dunno. With my current income, I frankly much prefer Steve's world. But when I was just starting out, perhaps living in Bill's world was better than having no computers at all.
But I still hated it, and ran off to Linux as soon as I could.
D
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Darn. Now you can't even get close.
The most expensive possible PowerMac G4 configuration is $ 12,406. Sadly, they give you $1,000 in "Promotion Savings" after charging you $2,000 for 1.5GB RAM; this did not help my "quest for the skies". However, considering that you could get 1.5GB RAM for about $375 elsewhere (see http://www.ramseeker.com ) I fear that I am not very impressed.
The most expensive PowerBook G4 configuration is $5,345. Sadly, they give you $ 700 in "Promotion Savings". Note that this includes 1GB RAM at their inflated prices; you'd be nuts to actually order it that way. I sure wish they could give me more than a puny 30GB disk; aren't notebooks up to 48GB by now? Oh well; perhaps when they freshen the line in September.
D
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Is emacs on the main OS CD or is it on the supplemental developer CD?
That's the usual way of bypassing the following bit in the GPL:
However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Did you even read my post -- I'm talking about custom pro *hardware* solutions like Avid and Digidesign, which is a big vertical for Apple. A rewrite to OS X will not be trivial for these folks.
As a friend of mine in audio said - "OS X makes $10,000 of equipment useless for me. I'm never going to upgrade."
Anyway, I don't disagree with your post at all. Only that you replied to the wrong person in some sort of misguided earnest.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Another nitch market Apple sells into is the dedicated pro sound/video workstation market (Avid, Digidesign, etc). The vendors in this space like Macs because they have consistant hardware and they like MacOS because it's so feeble that it can easily be shoved out of the way by their custom hardware/software solutions.
So far, MacOS X has not got a very good reception in this market at all. Not only does it mean a total rewrite of their products, it also means they have to fight with a "real" OS, just like on NT. I would imagine that MacOS 9 will stay supported for a number of years because of this and other vertical market issues.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Main reason was that it cost about a thousand dollars and was marketed as a special-purpose workstation OS. Which is exactly what Apple would have to charge today in order to cover their costs without the hardware business. Unrealistic.
Sorry, but MacOS X on Intel has "OS/2" or "BeOS" written all over it. Never going to happen -- There's only two ways to make it in the commodity OS market - have 90% marketshare or don't charge for your product.
Maybe a small group of john82-type hobbyists would pay for it (or would if the driver support was vastly expanded to cover 98% of PC mystery stuff). Most people will continue use the OS that came on their computer via MS OEM contract.
(Not to mention the technical issues of supporting the transition, not to mention the developer relation issues transitioning to both a new OS and a new platform, not to mention...)
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Congrats to Jordan for snagging a pretty sweel job over at Apple. I heard about this earlier today and found it pretty interesting. I think more experience with *BSD will help Apple out alot as they migrate from the old OS7 codebase to their MachBSD scheme. I don't see this though as Apple trying to grab an x86 developer and making him port shit to Intel processors. There's no need at all for Apple to switch ISAs. They are a hardware company and thus make their cash by selling hardware. Selling OSX for Intel machines would be ludicrous because no one would fucking buy it. Most PC users are anal enough about their "IBM Compatibles" without naysaying Apple for releasing a MacOS on Intel machines. A hundred million Windows/Intel users are not going to suddenly see the error of their ways and switch to MacOS or Linux for fuck sake. Jordan isn't being hired to port the Carbon library to x86. He's got useful experience with the type of development Apple has adopted for OSX. He's got the sort of experience to know when is a good time to release a kernel revision or how to manage a group responsible for a system component that no one will probably ever give a fuck about until it crashes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Noone can pass off a version of your software as their own unless you explicitly allow them to, and the BSD license explicitly forbids it just as much as the GPL does. And even if they did appropriate your software (or put a gun to your head and make you sign an exclusive license or a copyright assignment), that would not grant them control over previous versions released under the BSD license or the GPL. You can't revoke licenses you've already granted. All you can do is release new versions of your own (not anyone else's) software under a different license.
DES
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What counts makes you a "unix vendor"? Total copies shipped? Total copies in use? Total number of users? What kind of users -- interactive or other client/server clients?
Even though no one in my office has a copy of FreeBSD, all 600+ of them are "FreeBSD users" by merit of their use of DHCP and DNS services run on FreeBSD.
You could argue that the biggie Unix vendors like Sun/HP/IBM can claim hundreds of millions of users worldwide based on pervasive client-server based systems in use by governments or other organizations that are hard to ignore.
Every now and then there's posters on /. who wonder how one makes money with Open Source. Well, read this press release, this is how you do it...
Heh, you mean having to take on a second full-time job? I think a lot of us already have enough trouble maintaining a social life as it is. :)
Cheers,
Why bother trying to sound reasonable if you're going to follow it with bullshit like "Them thar Smart Tags control web content!"? Later, dude.
Cheers,
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But then again, I could be wrong.
Apple didn't start charging for the OS until 7.1 (System 7 Pro), back in 1992. The stink this caused was amazing. Apple did put System 7 in a shrink-wrapped box, but if you just wanted to copy the floppies, any Mac dealer would do it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
The interesting thing here is that APL, under which Darwin is released, is actually less free than BSD, and even than GPL... yet a leading BSD proponent will work with Apple. That should give food for thought for those who have made the point that they despise GPL for being less free than BSD.
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Leandro Guimarães Faria Corsetti Dutra
DBA, SysAdmin
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Various arguements have been posted here as to why apple can't move to X86 hardware, and for the most part I believe them. The only possible way would be for Apple to create a proprietary motherboard/bios combination that only allowed booting if their OS and all that. If apple is looking for more power on a platform that doesn't have the ability to piss off MS and loose all hardware sales, they should look to the alpha. It has all the power they will need, its already 64 bit, and in terms of a highly powerful graphical OS there aren't too many options, no one is going to go and run NT 4 on a new alpha, there are openVMS and Tru64, but I don't think they are competing at quite the same spot. FreeBSD and Linux also come for the alpha, but there aren't that many graphics drivers for X. All that it would really take is Apple developing some proprietary PAL code, as has been done before on the alphas to prevent some OS's from booting, and then they would have control of their hardware platform, and have screaming performance. The only problem being that the alpha seems to be in its last days unfortunatly, after being sold (given) to Intel, who will likely do little to help keep it a leading edge competitor to Itanium, and it will probably die the slow death that a good number of other superior technologies have suffered at the hands of stupid and greedy MBA's.
Sorry for the run on sentance.
If anything BSD should see this as a challenge. Now that BSD will be introduced to millions of users with OSX, it will push the developers to cater to the new users, curious to see BSD in its natural clothing, not dressed for the Prom.
Take the emergence of OSX as a kick in the pants to get moving on a more user friendly version of BSD to cater to those who want to see what the hubub is all about. Hubbard moving to Apple is an opportunity to teach the public about BSD, Darwin, and open source.
BSD is not dying, it has been handed a golden opportunity. Apple is making a big push to put its machines into schools. You know those kids are going to go straight to the commandline to see what makes OSX tick. If you have any marketing savvy, you know what to do from there.
BSD and Apple working together will be good for both.
photosMy Photostream
Jordan Hubbard is an anagram for "HARD RUB JOB DNA". Which is exactly what Apple is trying to do to its BSD competitors!
cpeterso
Jordan Hubbard is also an anagram for "RAD HAND JOB RUB". mmmm.
cpeterso
Darwin *IS* substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2! There is not generic BSD to base it on!
So they had a choice of dragging out their ancient copy of 44BSD-Lite, or choosing amongst modern Free, Open or Net. The choice FreeBSD. All of the *BSDs have code from the others, so this is no slight against any of them.
How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
A nonsense question, really. FreeBSD *is* BSD. So are OpenBSD and NetBSD.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I've got Mac friends who are excited by OSX. But they don't plan to switch until all of the wrinkles get ironed out.
Dot-oh releases always suck. If the guys at your office didn't want to experiment they shouldn't have switched. That's no fault against OSX.
If Mac people don't want to have anything to do with Unix, they don't have to! It's like two operating systems in one, and you have the choice of using one, the other, or both. Let's see the Window guys do that...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
And FreeBSD is a direct descendant of the unencumbered 4.4BSD-Lite. As I recall, 386BSD was the first usable BSD unencumbered by AT&T code, and FreeBSD 1.0 was merely a fork since Bill Jolitz stopped maintaining 386BSD. FreeBSD really is BSD.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yeah, but can you use BSD and Win2K simultaneously? Can you pipe your WinY2K processes through a BSD filter? Can you configure your BSD through the control panel?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Sorenson is seperate company from Apple. Apple licensed the Sorenson codec for QuickTime.
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InstantCool
Now if he can only get Apple to release Quicktime for the opensource OS's, I'd be happy :-)
Who said he wasn't staying with FreeBSD? He was part of the patchkit team that birthed FreeBSD and he was the first full time employee of WC CDROM to work on FreeBSD. He ate then and he ate when he worked at BSDi and Wind River. He's just eating better maybe at Apple ;), but he still plays the same role in the FreeBSD project that he always has.
Did you even read the message? For that matter, do you ever read any stories? "as I understand it"..where the hell have you been for the last 2 years?
--
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
The only thing he's leaving is Wind River. Linux works for Transmeta, but he's still at the top of the Linux pyramid.
JKH is still the chief PR spokesman for FreeBSD and it's release engineer and Core team member.
THAT HAS NOT CHANGED.
--
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
All of the arguments you make only work if Apple were to continue creating and selling proprietary hardware. The truth is that if they want any market share they need to ditch the hardware so they can actually compete. There are a few people out there willing to go buy a new mac, usually because they are either already mac users or quite frankly don't know any better. Anyone who is currently a PC user isn't about to go buy a mac. So where does that leave Apple? Going after the ever shrinking market for first time computer buyers.
But if they ditch the hardware they won't have to beat both Microsoft and the myriad of PC hardware vendors, they'll be able to leverage the PC just like Microsoft has. This is is why Linux is such a success, it isn't because its free and it isn't necessarily because it is such a great OS. Linux is popular because you can run it on the computer you already own without giving up the OS and software you're already using.
I can assure you that Apple is well aware of this fact and that the Linux phenomena has not been overlooked by them. If they are smart they will choose to compete and stop fooling themselves into thinking that they are somehow special and that the law of the jungle does not apply to them. If they are not smart the law of the jungle will ensure that they die, regardless of what Microsoft does to keep them alive as token competition.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
If Apple wants to survive they have to cater to more than what a niche market likes or prefers. Apple has to go for the mainstream because that is the only way they are going to stay alive. Mainstream users are used to the fluid multitasking and efficient behavior of Windows. Sticking with an antiquated OS architecture that just can't keep up is a sure way to make themselves even more marginalized than they are already.
So far OS-X hasn't really delivered. It does multitask better, but it is very sluggish and its user interface behavior leaves something to be desired.
Hopefully they'll do what needs to be done to get the efficiency up and then port it to the PC. If they don't they can kiss their ass goodbye because no one is going to buy slower hardware to run a slower OS just because they want to "think different."
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I think the metric in this case is units shipped, rather than overall size of the vendor. I don't know the specific numbers and I'm too lazy to check, but I'm pretty sure that Apple ships more machines than any other Unix vendor. If someone would like to back this up or shoot it down with real numbers...
--
Um, not that I agreed with the clown, but he got pretty close (to within about 15% of your number) starting with a number (Theo's) that is probably just an educated guess. That's not too bad. Also, nowhere in the section you quoted does he put a cap on the number of FreeBSD users. He just says there are 'about' that many. And he is right. There are 'about' 40,000 users, if you round to the one sig. fig. he started with. That's a pretty impressive result, considering he was using only the relative number of usenet posts as his yardstick.
As for his contention that *BSD is dead, well, the code is out there, and people are working on it. So we all know better, don't we? Why let him get to you?
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
That and also the fact you need at least a 600 G3 so that desktop navigation doesn't take all day.
RAM is more important than CPU power, and the biggest consumer of memory is Classic, the Mac OS 9 compatibility environment. As more apps become native, the need for Classic should deminish.
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
That's sort of the picture the mass technology media has painted, but I think the reality is considerably more complex than that. There's not really enough room to explain the whole thing here but the essence of the issue is that Apple creates complete products. They are not merely an OS vendor, nor are they a hardware assembly service.
As far as I can tell, Apple and Sony are the only desktop hardware companies left actually developing products -- which is why their machines cost more. There are hardware companies that mainly buy components, put them all together, and try to charge slightly more than what it cost them to build the machine. We have plenty of these types of companies.
Mac OS X for x86 would give some people people immediate, short-term gratification, but I think it would really kill one of the industry's key sources of innovation in the long term. Bottom line: there's little reason to create Mac OS X applications when the same people have Windows-capable (or Linux-capable) hardware. The result: lack of differentiation, and lack of progress. 50% of the population thinks Apple's software sells the hardware, the other 50% thinks that the hardware sells the software. It's neither. It's a symbiotic relationship -- they rely on and complement each other. But this isn't immediately obvious to the user. They take these things for granted, and just see it as part of "the computer."
For example, the PowerPC runs at lower temperatures and uses less energy than its x86 counterparts. This is why several of Apple's machines are fanless, and substantially quieter as a result. And it does this so while providing more performance per clock cycle.
Few actually seem to notice, but Apple is in the process of creating substantial long-term value in the company. Revamping the OS, reinventing the hardware, fixing the advertising, opening retail stores, creating (free) industry-leading developer tools, and releasing open source software. These are all elements of building infrastructure. One by one, they're removing the barriers in front of them. They're in this for the long haul. Relegating them to an x86 OS vendor would dash any hope of true variety in commercial computing options.
(Voline, I realize your comment was not meant to be anti-Apple)
- Scott
--
Scott Stevenson
WildTofu
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Silicone Valley is a few miles south of here. Also known as LA.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This was unquestionably Jobs' idea.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This is terrific news. As Jordan mentioned, Apple will shortly be the UNIX volume leader, and I'm glad to see one of the leading lights of the BSD world joining them.
Now, all we need is an open-source re-implementation of Quartz. Once we take X windows out behind the barn and shoot it through the head, then UNIX will reach its full potential on *all* platforms.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, more of the code is from OpenBSD and NetBSD than FreeBSD, according to an Apple Engineer.
Finally, I think Jordan is right when he says that Apple will give back to the Open source community. Apple's been flamed on /. many times over their "all take, no give back" policy toward open source. Well, looks like they're improving. It'll be interesting to see what Apple does give back in the next year.
Actually if you use version 10.0.4, it's much, much faster.
PLus, when 10.1 comes out inm July, it'll be close to OS 9 in speed.
True, however a large number of Mac fans are already pissed at Apple and Motorola for the extremely poor rate of PowerPC improvements.
I dunno if the Carbonated apps can simply be recompiled for something for x86. Probably not.
Carbon is essentially a complete rewrite of the classic Mac OS API to run on BSD and Mach. Considering they've gone to some trouble to make Darwin x86-compatible, I would think they also had portability in mind when writing Carbon and Quartz. There may not be x86 machines running Mac OS X in secret Apple labs today, but I suspect they could do it in not very much time if they had to.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Psst...
All Apple really needs to do is decide to only support certain components - "Apple Certified" and write the drivers for those and those alone, then as long as you had a CHRP box you could use any of the supported components.
Of course that's just their opening act. After that there's an onslaught of component-makers suddenly porting over their device drivers to Darwin, and the whole cycle that Windows once spawned will begin again - only this time you won't have to buy a special pass from BillG to get a peek at the API calls for the OS. But you will have to give Apple $130 if you want to use their GUI, the Cocoa APIs, and the intense graphics services of Quartz, OpenGL, and QuickTime.
What's going to happen in the long run is kind of weird for Apple. Already there are a dozen or more GUIs that build on X-Windows and provide all the WIMP we need. Nothing precludes this from happening on MacOS X and in fact it's already underway. What's going to matter for Apple in the long run is that they protect their sources of revenue - currently that's a lot of precious holy hardware with an appliance-like styling and intent. There are good reasons to tie the OS to the hardware when you consider what would happen to that whole side of Apple's business and their emotional investment in the promise of the PowerPC.
What I forsee is not MacOS on your average PC. The only option for Apple is to make their own Intel or AMD boxen with very specific hardware support for the standard ports we find in all Macs - Firewire, USB, Ethernet, ATA.... Yep, that's got to be it.
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
-- thinkyhead software and media
If Apple really feels that they can not compete using Motorolas PowerPC, it is a lot more likely that they will move to the 'Power'(no PC there) line from IBM which is compatible with the PowerPC and 64Bit (Power is to PowerPC like UltraSparc is to Sparc).
And with IBM getting to ship more of them they should get into the pricerange of x86 procs,too.
--Ulrich
--Ulrich
On no accounts allow a Vogon to read poetry at you
Mac OS X is Apple's future. It's not going away because of some initial early-release teething pains.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- from the compiler course I took at college
I'm a graphic artist using a Mac, and I have installed and use OS X, but I can't use it for some of the major graphics tasks yet. I won't have our other Mac users install it yet (I'm the department Early Adopter and Go-To Guy for upgrades) until our Adobe applications work with it.
I was very glad to hear that FileMaker works much better with the 10.0.4 update. We use that as well, so we could roll our own databases without IS "help".
I'm terribly excited with pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, etc. with OS X. I would have numbered it as Mac OS XI.XI (9.9!) but if not for some non-compatible apps I'd be using OS X all day long, even without some of the old OS 9 features and performance.
I will also continue to support WindRiver's efforts in any way I can to ensure that the FreeBSD product line there continues and that FreeBSD can continue to be a solution which is broadly applicable to a wide array of markets.
The FreeBSD product line has reached the stage where I feel comfortable taking a job which allows me to focus more on Darwin. While I have enjoyed my time working with the people and projects at BSDi and WindRiver, I simply couldn't resist the
opportunity of working at Apple.
Nice move on his behalf as everyone needs to make a living, however I wonder a few things. How will this impact FreeBSD in the future. It's nice to for Jonathan to say he will continue to assist with the project, but what happens when his time becomes consumed at Apple, and he *has no* time for the FreeBSD project, how will FreeBSD stand up.
Another curiousity is, whether or not Apple has plans to move into another arch. Surely Jonathan could provide them with a variety of snippets on how to get it going, and if this does happen, how would FreeBSD compete with a company like Apple.
Now for the record *BSD is dying posts* will be ignored so don't bother trolling, I would like to hear perhaps from a developer what actions (if any) could, and would FreeBSD take, should Apple decide to switch into the i386 arena with Darwin.
Also I wonder how this will affect others who may be looking to focus more on themselves, as time becomes more valuable, and others decide to follow suit focusing more on a company and themselves, rather than the OS (FreeBSD). Are there backup developers, or does the team distribute the work left behind by a developer who jumped ship.
P.S. I hope the developers still aren't pissed at me these (1 2)
Want Root?
When did he say he was leaving FreeBSD?
-bugg
Sure would be nice to be able to play Sorenson-encoded Quicktime movies on my Linux box. Heck, I'd even install *BSD if that's what it took.
Every now and then there's posters on /. who wonder how one makes money with Open Source.
Well, read this press release, this is how you do it...
-John
Actually, this used to be the case back in pre-System-7 Days. You could walk into any AppleCentre with a bunch of floppy disks (about 4 usually) and ask for a copy of the Operating System - they would often charge you for their time copying the disks, I think it was about £10, but the OS itself was free of charge. I did it myself when upgrading my MacPlus (1MB RAM with a 10MB Rodime hard disk and I managed to 3D model a conference centre in Paris for final year Architecture project on it... those were the days :-)
You can still download older versions of the Mac OS up to 7.5.5 for free at Apple's FTP sites. Granted, however, that they won't work on anything built after 1997.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~David.Lockwood/Macinto sh_RIP.html
It's those hieroglyphs that really suck.
http://homepages.tesco.net/~David.Lockwood/Macinto sh_RIP.html
Compaq has killed the Alpha. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/19951.html --Sean
Saying that Microsoft somehow needs Apple to keep the DoJ off their back is out of date. Clearly, Microsoft is no longer worried about the DoJ: bundling MSN messenger, adding smart tags so they can control content on the web, changing their licensing agreements to force users to upgrade, and bundling VoIP clients into XP. Having Apple around to show they don't have a monopoly isn't enough to stem their recent activity. They probably figure they can entrench their position pretty well until dubya gets replaced in office. No, I think it's more likely that as long as the Macintosh BU is making Microsoft money but not cannibalizing Windows sales, and Apple keeps "preferring" Internet Explorer, they'll keep writing software for it. But if Apple gets into selling an OS for x86, the gloves will come off.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
You have to have watched Apple for a LONG time. If so, the argument can be made that Apple did ship in a restricted way the X86 version of Mac OS X. It takes a bit of a stretch.....
The WWDC statement from the Apple CEO was that the new OS (dubbed Rhapsody) would work on X86 AND PPC hardware. Apple *DID* ship this product to developers, DR2. Mac OS X server DID identify itself as Rahpsody when you did a uname -a.
Steve Jobs pitch for the Mac was it was a closed box. The iMac removed the internal interface slot, thus returning to its closed nature. Apple is tight lipped about its hardware (see Be Inc, NetBSD or any of the Linux PPC companies if you don't believe it), so unless Apple can own the hardware spec from top to bottom, Apple under Jobs doesn't want to deal with it.
In short, X86 based Mac OS X boxes aren't comming soon.
Moving to Apple and working for Steve Jobs, a man who stopped bathing (he was on a fruit diet), dodged child support, liked putting his feet in toilets and flushing (its like a mini whirlpool - 1979 Time interview) and a well documented egotistical bastard, the situation at Wind River must REALLY be bad for FreeBSD getting support from Wind River. Wind River wanted BSD/OS, and got it. Any ties to FreeBSD were 'part of the package'. Wind River seems to have 0 PR flaks working on getting press for FreeBSD. Not that BSDi did better on promoting FreeBSD, but at least BSDi acknolged FreeBSD existed.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Apples OWNS exclusive licensing of the Sorensen codec, according to Sorensen. He has no control of its use at this point, only Apple does.
And Apple is not playing along. They will provide Quicktime SERVERS that run on linux, but not a client. Nor will they allow one to be used.
It goes further though - Apple also has licensing rights for TrueType font patents. They make $$ from other operating systems (like Windows) for these patents. They are an obvious extension of Metafont (of TeX fame). They do not allow open source use of these patents, although they are not challenging the Freetype project at this point in time.
Apple is utterly unconcerned about the community. They are only concerned about their own $$. If they were really concerned, they could allow patent licensing to Freetype and xanim to ensure TrueType fonts and Quicktime movies are viewable under linux.
Right now, as a linux user, you simply feel like a door has been slammed in your face.
"the next version wil be a lot less *nix-y". Uh. Not likely, they've pinned their future on OS X and its BSD foundation.
The graphic artists in your office who downgraded, its probably because Adobe has been slow off the mark in Carbonizing their apps. If they're like most graphic artists, they are dead in the water without Illustrator and Photoshop. "Low level access" to their computers has nothing to do with it. OS X protects users from having to do anything at the command-line. It's a different user experience than OS 9, but it's certainly not giving them anything like the complexity associated with the average Linux installation.
Apple would not have done better by continuing with OS 9. They've squeezed as much as they can out of a very old OS with no protected memory, no preemptive multitasking, and limited networking power. Not to embrace *NIX would have been suicide.
As for wanting "low-level access", a lot of Mac users do want it, but those that don't want it don't have to bother with it. Gee, what a concept!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You said:
Apple will not be porting the Mac OS to x86 for the same reason that Steve Jobs won't allow the smallest bit of GPLed code into Darwin. It would put Apple out of business.
Ready?
1) Emacs is GPL'd
2) Emacs is included into the OS X install.
Thus, I show you to be wrong.
Here's an idea: let's require those who are commenting on apple's software to include a disclaimer in the same vein as IANAL. We could call it IDRAS (I Don't Run Apple Software).
Well, in any case, IRAS. I'd guess this guy didn't.
Um, you guys don't know heads from tails. Go read up a bit.
If you go to to apple's darwin site (i think it's www.opensource.apple.com/darwin) and check in the projects listing, you'll find a little entry for emacs.
What you're not getting is that Darwin is NOT just a kernel. It is a whole operating system distribution.
CmdrTaco confirmed this week that *BSD trolls account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all Slashdot posting. This news serves to reinforce what we've known all along; *BSD trolls are collapsing in complete disarray.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict a *BSD Troll's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD Trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD Trolls because sooner or later, their Windows95 boxes will hang. As many of us are already aware, *BSD Trolls continues to be moderated down to -1. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Anonymous Coward is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Amiga Troll leader Anonymous Coward states that there are 7,000 Amiga Trolls on Slashdot . How many *BSD Trolls are there? Let's see. The number of Amiga versus Emacs Trolls roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7,000/5 = 1,400 Emacs Trolls. Hot-Grits Trolls on Slashdot are about half of the volume of Emacs Trolls. Therefore there are about 700 Hot-Grits Trolls. A recent article put *BSD Trolls at about 10 percent of the Hit-Grits Trolls. Therefore there are 700*.10 = 70 *BSD Trolls. This is consistent with the number of *BSD Troll postings.
Due to the troubles of *BSD Trolls karma and so on, Anonymous Coward went down this weekend, and was taken over by by a small shell script. That shell script was running on a leased Dell, and was taken back by the Dell Leasing for failure to pay. The computer was re-leased to a charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD Trolls have steadily declined in market share. *BSD Trolls are very sick, and look vaguly like the goatse.cx guy. Their prospects are very dim. If *BSD Trolls are to survive at all it will be among Microsfot-OS dabblers.. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD Trolls are dead.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
He can't work there - that means they'll have to give every copy of OSX away for free! Can't they see the error of their ways?- -------
------------------------------------------
Dalmation and Tie-Dye iMacs? OSX withouth key features? Manipulating the Woz?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Will Apple make Open Source mainstream?
Will Jordan find happiness in Cupertino?
Will FreeBSD end up conquering the world?
The answer to these, and other questions, in the next episode of, "Silicone Valley".
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"Hubbard said he'll work to see that what he learns at Apple about software, such as user interface design, is applied to FreeBSD. And he hopes there will be cooperation between Apple and FreeBSD on subjects such as support for Universal Serial Bus and Firewire, two methods for plugging peripherals such as digital cameras into computers." http://investor.cnet.com/investor/news/newsitem/0- 9900-1028-6384175-0.html?tag=pt.yahoo.fin..ne
This clown is completely full of shit. He has posted the SAME post 23 time in this thread. Is this a loser or what? I run the BSD counter page. It is still a work in progress and has not been advertised much but at the moment I have 43,013 verified FreeBSD users in my database. This loser, in demonstrating that he failed statistics, says there are no more than 36,400 FreeBSD users. My count also does not include the BSDi, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or OsX users. And given that *BSD is more a server OS than Linux the count of machines running *BSD is going to be much higher than Linux.
For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Dead, my kosher ass! Run along, little boy, and annoy someone else.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Definitely better than their original idea -- bringing in Theo De Raadt to lead their PR department.
No, no: Theo DeRaadt was for Apple's legal department...
For starters, the guys name is Jordan, not Jonathan.
Second, why has this been mod'ed up? These are sad times indeed.
Third, if you did compose the emails referenced at the bottom of your post, I'm glad that you are busying yourself posting trolls to slashdot. At least it occupies your otherwise worthless time and contains your misguided cack-spraffings within an area alloted for such behaviour.
Arse!
Si
Oh yeah... and a big shout out to puff daddy
From his letter:
"Darwin is substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2"
I don't know if that qualifies as a 'basis'
or not in you definition, but I would certainly
say the kernel isn't _THAT_ different.
Anonymous posts are filtered.
The OS sells the boxes, the boxes keep Apple in business. Simple.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Apple doesnt own the sorenson codec, so even if there is a linux quicktime player at some point (which i hope there is) that is still no guarantee that sorenson will play along. Hopefullu they can be convinced
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
The wonderful thing about OS X is that one does not have to know anything about UNIX to use it. The reason that non-UNIX people don't like it is because there is not really any software ported yet. UNIX people love it based on the fact that they can use the UNIX shell and can compile most of their favorite software. Once companies start releasing OS X versions of their software, then it will attract more non-UNIX users.
There are a couple of things that are "dumbed down" in the new OS, for example the root account is not accessable without some tricks, but they encourage other utilities such as sudo. Also, it would have been nice if they would have put an X-Windows system standard in the OS, but that will probably come in time.
CMM
The strength of Open Source initiatives originate in the involvement of their participants, and dialogue is essential to their success. With this in mind, we'd like to hear your questions and concerns. We'll incorporate your inquiries into a Q&A on our web site to help you and others with similar questions.
Please submit any questions that you have about Darwin or any of Apple's Open Source activities by July 6, 2001 to admin_at_opensource.apple.com, and be sure to include "Open Source Question" in the subject line. With your help, we will be able provide relevant information to all developers and interested parties.
Additionally, you will be able to pose your questions in person at the following USENIX 2001 BOF's:
BOF Date & Time: Thursday June 28th, 10:00-10:30PM
BOF Title: UNIX Goes Translucent: Mac OS X & Darwin
BOF Presenter: Ernest Prabhakar, Open Source Product Manager
Find out how Mac OS X will soon be bringing BSD to millions of consumer desktops.
BOF Date & Time:Thursday June 28th, 10:30-11:30PM
BOF Title:BSD Panel Session moderated by Marshall Kirk McKusick
BOF Presenter:Christos Zoulas (NetBSD), TBD (OpenBSD),Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD), Mike Karels (BSD/OS), Ernest Prabhakar (Darwin)
Come speak to representatives of the BSD groups, ask all your interoperability questions, and hear about the future of BSD. -end of message- The message was sent from Brian Cassidy of Apple to the following lists:p le.com,
publicsource-announce-request_at_lists.ap
darwin-development_at_lists.apple.com,
darwinos-users_at_lists.apple.com,
macos-x-server_at_lists.apple.com
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
The Quartz compositor in Mac OS X is fast. Although more optimisations can be done it is not the source of the apparently sluggish GUI.
Two things give the user the impression that the Mac OS X GUI is slow:
1. The new Finder is badly written. It uses Metrowerks PowerPlant framework and it is slow. Since this it what most people think of as the GUI they mistakenly conclude that it is the Quartz core graphics system when that is not the case. Not all apps exibit this lack of speed
2. Live window resizing. Nice eye candy but unusable on anything but the fastest of Macs. I don't know why it is this way.
Speed optimisations are the next thing that Apple is working on for Mac OS X. You have to appreciate how big a deal it was for them to get a new OS out the door.
Don't blame me - this
But why can't they sell OSX on x86? Isn't that hardware too???
You missed the point. Apple makes most of their money off of the machines that they sell. If Apple sells one high end G4 for $20,000 then they will make more than than they would selling 100 copies of OSX to x86 users.
x86 is cheaper faster, and easier to manage for apple and the customers
x86 is cheaper but does not include the math powers of the PPC and AltiVec. Quartz would probably choke on x86 unless it was a high speed Duron or something, and even then it would just be raw speed keeping the OS going. Look how slow it runs on PPC alone!
It would also be far harder to support the wide variety of hardware on the x86 platform, as compared to the Apple controlled hardware that they put out. When they ported Rhapsody to x86 (Blue Box), it supported a bare minimum of hardware for a reason. Apple only included what they wanted to support, avoiding the plague that has screwed up Windows for years.
Apple will port Darwin to the PC, but never Aqua. Apple has too much invested in PPC and AltiVec.
The clash of honour calls, to stand when others fall.
Hrmph? A long time ago, it stood for Berkley Software Distribution, and was distributed (suprise!) by UC Berkley. Their last release was in (IIRC) '92, and it was called 4.4BSD-Lite. NeXTStep (is that the kosher capatilization) was based on 4.2 originally, and has been upgraded to Darwin (now at 1.3, including a X86 ISO install image) using FreeBSD 3.2 as a reference platform.
Gee, nerds need to get a life if it is considered news when someone changes jobs!
Given that the BSD license does not require that all derivative works be made freely available as source, Hubbard bringing his tricks to work on OS X won't be a problem for Apple.
.NET and Smart Tags are going to drive to their platform.
Will this be a problem for FreeBSD? The guy has to work somewhere. Torvalds works for Transmeta, why not Hubbard at Apple? I admit that there may be some problem for FreeBSD (besides loss of a talented developer) that I'm overlooking.
Hopefully this will get Apple ready for those hordes of users that
Apple will not be porting the Mac OS to x86 for the same reason that Steve Jobs won't allow the smallest bit of GPLed code into Darwin. It would put Apple out of business.
.09 micron technologies to work on the PowerPC chip. It'll catch up then.
Look folks, Apple is a hardware company. That's were they really make their money. People buy their boxes in order to get the Mac OS. If they could run the Mac OS on cheaper x86 boxes many of them would choose to do so. Of course many people would still buy Titanium PowerBooks and iBooks for other reasons, but fewer.
So don't hold your breath waiting for the chance to run OS X on an Athlon box, it isn't going to happen. If it's speed you crave, just wait for IBM to put their silicon on insulator and
Maybe some PHP javascript wizardry along with liberal doses of perl could easily turn a page into
...
Another trick could be a warning to users:
"You are using MS whatever browser. Microsoft's software automatically modifies the presentation of the content of this page without the permission of this content provider. Do you wish to view this page?" Or "please return to this page using Mozilla/Netscape/Opera" etc Wouldn't be anymore difficult than a plugin check.
Hmm perhaps an ActiveX control that asks whether the use wants to "disable Microsoft modifications to the content of this page"
no, but he states how he believes that leaving BSDi/Windriver is ok at this time because FreeBSD has reached a certain point. I took this to mean his time available for FreeBSD would be lessened.
Scott
I think this is a good thing overall, though his presence on the FreeBSD team will surely be missed.
:) (not that the two are mutually exclusive)
Like he states--Apple will literally soon be the largest UNIX vendor on the planet. This means more exposure, more people skilled in UNIX, and more jobs for the programmer types.
Definitely a good thing. While Open Source is good, I put my faith more in the forces of Capitalism to make something succesful
Scott
Java-stuff of course runs natively, uses the Aqua GUI via Swing.
Quick clarification: Java still doesn't run "natively". Java programmers can use Aqua as the "native" Swing look and feel (L&F) in Java on OS X, and the latest Developer Preview of the Java Virtual Machine from Apple hardware accelerates the Aqua L&F to the point that Java apps in Swing/Aqua can fly (some bugs with double buffering, however). Hopefully once the bugs are worked out, this acceleration will make OS X far and away the best platform for Java apps, as even GUI-intensive apps won't feel the kind of slowdown most schmoes unfortunately associate with Java programs. (Strangely, AWT isn't hardware accelerated, but that's another thread.)
Though Apple has given Java some good support to reaching into the system toolbox, as I'm sure the poster realizes, the true Java code is still interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine. It is not run natively (a la gcj).
Ruffin Bailey
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Definitely better than their original idea -- bringing in Theo De Raadt to lead their PR department.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
MacOS X does need some tweaking, especially in the speed department... Go, dude, go!
I hope he can also give those guys pointers regarding the Aqua/Quartz speed =\ it needs a little work in that area. I kind of hope he can suggest some improvemnets to the Gui speed because quite frankly it needs some work there.
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Jon - TheSpork
i do not use or ever have, but because there market share is droping does not mean they are dieing, it just means that they are not growing as fast as other operating systems like windows and linux
Yeah if MS had chosen to use more open source code they WOULD have a better OS but thats not the point. We already known open source code is better for things like operating systems. The point is what is the goal? What do you want to happen to your code? For an open source developer they have the choice of a GPL or BSD like license. If I wanted my software to be TRULY and ALWAYS free that means I need a license that will prevent a corporation from taking my code and making a few alterations on it so they can pass it off as their own. The GPL protects your code from that. The BSD does not. So basically if we want any of this to survive, all this great software that the open source community has created there really isn't much of a choice. It has to be GPL or else the code may be "open" but it will also be in danger of being taken back into the world of proprietary use. Of course if you are a developer who doesn't give a fuck either way then sure go ahead the BSD license is right up your alley. :)
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"The BSD license provides FREEDOM to use code as YOU see fit." ---Thats exactly the point. A company is FREE to come and take BSD code and do WHATEVER they want with it, including taking it proprietary if they wish to do so. You may have some desires down the road to take someone else's code and make it proprietary but thankfully the GPL won't allow anyone to do this. The BSD license is nothing to be proud of. Its basically a ticking time clock for when open source code will become inaccessible to the community that helped to create it. That doesn't sound very "free" to me at all.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"Of the three graphic artists (their main user-base) at my office who've used Mac OSX two have downgraded back to OS9 and the other spends all her time in the emulation mode. Macintosh users are not accustomed to low-level access to their computers and nor do they want it." Duh. Their programs don't run natively on OS X yet so they HAVE to use the Classic layer until they do. That means nothing for adoption of OS X. When there are native versions of their most needed programs they won't have any trouble using it. As for just keeping the old OS and updating it with a few new features yeah that would have been exciting. All the developers who are drooling over OS X never gave OS 9 or below a second thought. Not to mention OS 9 wasn't the most stable of OS's nor did it have protected memory or pre-emptive multitasking...etc I could go on but I hope you get the point by now.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Apple would be better off porting OS X server to intels new 64-bit processor, since no one would use this hodge podge OS when you have FreeBSD and its VMS style virtual memory! FreeBSD is fast, powerful, and stable!
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
So it seems I was wrong all this time. What's the real story? How much of Darwin is based on parts of FreeBSD that are not part of BSD?
Apple would also have to dump the "Classic" compatibility layer of OS X (which will be a problem for a lot of people). I dunno if the Carbonated apps can simply be recompiled for something for x86. Probably not.
You may be right though, as Motorola is really fucking up the PowerPC. If they do go x86, they would definitely use nVidia's new platform (and AMD Athlon), because they already have close ties with them, and the hardware specs fits Apple's need perfectly (except for dual-processor).
It might just make sense for Apple to make a gradual transition to x86. Initially just have an x86 Power Mac model, and go from there.
They borrow from *BSD and not from Linux.
They give back to *BSD, not Linux.
Of course, to the huge majority of GNU/Linux zealots, it's treacherous, and they won't stop bitching. It's not Linux, after all, that's been choosen as the foundations for OS X, and that's a hell of a pain in the ass to Linux zealots..
i had a sig, once..
Now, steal this developer.
What is pirate software? Software for inventory of stolen treasure?
Apple calls BSD Darwin's "wrapper." As a lot of work has already gone into porting Darwin over, Hubbard's expertise with BSD on x86 hardware will only make that easier. Sure, he can help with the open-source community, but of all the names people call Steve Jobs, stupid usually isn't among them.
And Motorola's PowerPC, despite the embedded market, simply hasn't allowed Mac OS to compete on a horsepower (or economy-of-scale) basis. If Apple's working internally on the x86 alternative -- and I'd bet my cat they have been for some time - this could be very, very significant news.
Can you imagine? Mac OS X (and onward) on decent hardware? Screw Altivec, give me SMP Athlons. Overnight, the desktop landscape would change for consumers and professionals.
That's if, of course, Apple can stomach firing their hardware design people and start writing device drivers to go with that kernel. But frankly, I'm kind of stoked.
Under any other regime, this would probably be the case. But since when does Jobs (the terms 'Steve Jobs' and 'Apple Computer are pretty much interchangeable at this point) bend to the will of consumers? If anything, he has a track record of making the user bend to his will. Remember floppies? Does OSX run on anything pre-Jobs without a serious hack? Sometimes this strategy backfires on him (see NeXT), but he seems to have done a pretty good job of this since his return to Apple.
I for one, hope the ghosts of companies past win out, and OSX retains it's wholesome 'nixy goodness. (And holy shit, I'm one of the Mac faithful.)
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
How long can you go on being noble before you realize you have to eat too? And hell, as I understand it MacOS X has a unix base. Mayhaps this will end up being a good thing, revival of Apple and all that snazzy stuff. I for one would love to see some really slick running Unices that can make full use of that wonderful apple hardware.
Oh well. Flame on.
-Eric Dizkord
-Eric Dizkord
"I always thought Dark Futures had to be in the future
Of the three graphic artists (their main user-base) at my office who've used Mac OSX two have downgraded back to OS9 and the other spends all her time in the emulation mode. Macintosh users are not accustomed to low-level access to their computers and nor do they want it.
Apple would've done a hell of alot better to build a WM for *nix and continued making the Mac Evangelistas happy by giving them the same ol' product with an OS upgrade with some cheesy feature which they would've lapped up (like Sherlock??).
AC
Working for Walnut Creek, BSDi, WindRiver = $ Working for Apple = $$$$ (plus heath & dental!) Can you blame him?
Everybody Wang-Chung tonight!
I think that Apple needs to get everyone it can under one roof, cause X needs some help. I've used it off and on since it came out and its incredibly slow even on the fastest G4. Not only that, but Apple is going to to have to target a completely different market, because after using it I've decided that its going to piss off a lot of hardcore mac fans. Right now OS X has more in common with Windoze than previous Mac OS's. Don't get me wrong, I hope Apple can pull it off, but I think they need someone to give them a bit of direction.
Ad 1) Decent machines. It's actually funny to see x86ers to go crazy about machines like AMD's just because they're slightly less crappy than the current Intel junk. No, the PPC IS decent hardware. Just take a look around and you'llsee that the PPC platform is very much alive and kicking. However, there's something there: Motorola seems to be letting Apple down. They don't really seem to be working on their G5 64bit chip. So what ? Firstly, there's IBM and then... (Can't give away too much, but be sure to see some more drastic step taken by Apple soon). Ad 2) There may not be x86 machines running Mac OS X in secret Apple labs today, but I suspect they could do it in not very much time if they had to As for x86, well... A lot of the development has taken place on Compaq Alpha processors though (quite a lot actually). Go figure...
Could it mean that they make the largest amount of money? Yes.
Could it mean that they have the largest building? Yes.
Could it mean that they have the largest group of employees? Yes.
Could it mean they have the largest user base? Yes.
Could it mean they've got the largest dilznicks? Yes.
As far as we know, the only interpretation that makes sense has to do with installed copies of OS X. Or maybe Jordan knows something we don't know.... Either way, based on that statement, there sure as hell ain't no way you do.