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Darwin Team Answers & Develop on Darwin
Lagos writes "In July Darwin developers at Apple had a call for questions. Their answers were posted on Monday and may be found here. There is some discussion of Apple's place within the Open Source community, though most of the questions answered are more technical." Along the same Darwinian lines, this submission came in: Maktoo writes "Maccentral is reporting that SourceForge.net has added PowerMac G4 Servers running MacOS X 10.1 into their Compile Farm. Now any apps you have going on SourceForge, you can test to see if it'll run on OS X! Gotta love that BSD heritage... OS X is already going to benefit greatly from all the apps it can use in the UNIX/Linux space. This just makes life easier for developers to bring even more."
If you interested in getting more OS X information in general, the Collge Park chapter of ACM is having a speaker from Apple today to talk about it. Its from 5-6, in the Classrom Building (yes, that actually is the name of one of our buildings), room 0111
Mod point free since 2001
The short answer is yes: OS X is a Unix variant - so you only need to recompile the software. In fact many tools of OS X are typical Unix programs, apache, perl, gcc, tcsh, etc...
The long answer is, it depends. While OS X is clearly Unix, there are some issues:
- OS X is from the BDS Unix familly, so linux programs might need some tweaking.
- OS X is structured differently from other Unixes, standart paths are different and configuration files are very different.
- Most Unix system use the X11 standart for GUI. OS X does not use X11 but instead a protocol based on display PDF. While it is possible to install an X11 server (for instance Xfree), this is not the default installation.
Still many Unix programs have been ported to OS X in the rather short timeframe of it's existence(~six months).If I was a foreman at a construction company, I wouldn't force the bricklayers to use hammers just because the carpenters are really productive with them. A computer is a tool. Use whichever one is right for the job.
Alot of my job revolves around web development. For me, OS X is perfect because I have Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, and vi all on the same machine. I tried to use Linux, but alot of my time was spent dual-booting.
You probably do other things, so another machine might be better suited for what you do. Whatever. Better or worse is all relative to what you want to accomplish.
Let me know when MS Word for Linux comes out.
Yes, Linux has penetrated the corporate server market. But it has not penetrated the corporate desktop market.
OS X has the potential to do so. Time will tell - it may not, but at least it's got a chance.
Wade
In stead of simply defaming the statement, please tell us why you disagree with it. What's most astounding is that your comment, with out any meat in it whatsoever got modded up, even more so than someone who posted an opinion with which you do not agree, and so (surprise!) believe should not have been modded up.
Simply disagreeing with an opinion does not make the opinion invalid, and moderation points aren't intended to allow the moderators to improve people's comments with which they agree, but instead to improve people's comments which make some valid point, or raise a valid concern, grounded in truth, or agreeing with their own opinion or not.