Slashdot Mirror
Apple Posts Their X11 Source
fdiv_bug writes "This happened a day or two ago, but it slipped my mind to report it. Looks like Apple has released the source code to their X11 implementation for Mac OS X." Also check out more downloads at OpenDarwin.org.
I wish they'd make up their minds on whether or not they're evil. My head hurts.
Nice to see some code spread on the net.
It doesn't really matter to real programmers if it's gpl or fbsd or anything.
Having the source and getting ideas from it is a good thing.
As a mac user only really currently on the outside of the open source movement I mostly want to see how this links with the development of Open Office, which I am very interested in...
Finally, the world can see the source code to an X11 implementation! I've waited for this moment for decades.
ummmmm, he's the only one around here who posts decent Apple stories...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
I don't know what the submitter has been smoking, but this did /NOT/ happen a few days ago.
I remember downloading it a couple weeks ago. It's been available for download since they released their X11 betas.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
I'm fairly new to the mac dev scene, and haven't played around with this code yet, but at over 50MB, and it being easily accesable, could compiling this become a new benchmark to add to the huge list of those floating around the mac web today?
Indeed. In this context, about means 'regarding' and not 'in the vicinity of'.
Lindows, only in reverse.
Im not a MAC user, but darn, that is really nice to have the ability to run X apps on a MAC. I think this really enhances the appeal of a MAC to a serious user.
Apple made a great move, adding *nix at its core with OS X.
Who's a year behind? Dell is finally starting to dump the floppy drive, they're five years behind! ;-) More, if you include the old legacy ports they still use.
Oh, you mean CPU speed? My 3 year old iMac is fast enough for everything I do, save for recent 3D games, and I don't really need those anyway. That's one thing hurting Apple's 'marketshare', the quality and longevity of their products.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
That's what we need access to!
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
All they put in the source tarball is the default twm. Thanks Apple.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
And even if they were, they might still do some things we think of as `good', and others we call `bad'. Corporations, like people, are complex things. Humans tend to think by simplifying, categorising, and labelling, but we must realise we're doing it, and avoid it when it loses too much information. The world is a complex place.
As Anonymous Coward said above, Apple has done many good things, and some bad ones. That's all there is to it. Predictive value? Well, I predict that in future they'll do some more good things and a few more bad things. Wow, huh?
(As it happens, I like a lot of the things Apple are currently doing, and I like their kit enough to own some. I'd like to see their stuff become more popular. But I've no illusions; I wouldn't like to see them have 90%+ share, just as I wouldn't like to see anyone have that sort of share. M$ may have an unusually immoral corporate ethos, but I doubt any company in their current position would be entirely altruistic for long. Power corrupts, and all that.)
(Er, sorry, this post has turned out inappropriately serious for this place! Feel free to insert hackneyed one-mouse-button-sniping, lame puns, and unrelated whinges as appropriate...)
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I agree
I know whining about not posted submissions is a no-no, but there are so many times I wish you could fend a submission to someone more likely to be following your subject matter, say Pudge for Apple stuff, Timothy for YRO, etc. Makes me want to learn more Perl just to get this into slashcode.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
/* Why can't people just use bloody Aqua */ // Damn GNU hippies - S. Jobs
To go even further, here's your typical implementation of AIM for Windows. And then there's Apple's implementation of AIM.
And i don't even have to mention their hardware. Sigh... i hope you get paid handsomely, noble Apple design team. WE SALUTE YOU!
From the perspective of a person who only owns a Macintosh Classic with 4mb of ram, "RELEASE THE SOURCE FOR OS 7!!!"
IIRC, each editor is assigned an 'early day'. Apparently they get up early (as early as 6 AM, oh the horror!) to go through the queue and make sure our European Slashdotters have something to look at.
/sw/bin/gimp > /dev/null 2>&1 &"
Frankly, that would be the perfect job for me. It's 6:15 AM on a Sunday and I'm wide awake.
It would be simple to figure out what day is Pudge's day and act accordingly.
-----
Just in case anyone wants to accuse me of being OffTopic: here's a X11-related hint. Use fink to install The GIMP in the usual location and make the following AppleScript:
tell application "Finder"
launch application "X11"
end tell
set results to do shell script "cd ~; DISPLAY=:0.0; export DISPLAY; PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH ;
That makes an AppleScript that opens X11 and the GIMP. Find an appropriate JPG of "Wilbur" the GIMP mascot, paste it into the "get info" icon box, and PRESTO! The GIMP in your dock!
My father is a blogger.
I've been thinking of designing something similar, but I was going to make something that worked a lot like DropScript. Drop an executable file onto it, and it will result in an OS X Application.
and again let me say 'just chill'. life (your mindset your health) has _everything_ to do with chilling out and seeing things for what they are. if you had read my comment a tad closer (or maybe even twice) you would see my comment on communism was a positive one (ie "i hope one day after the revolution when we are communists this wont matter). i abhor mccarthy-ism and its present day incarnation. and yes i concede that the license _does_ matter in for every charachter of code out there when you get down to the logistics of using it and basing a program on it. but for this (Apple releases X11 source to public) thats not what the story is about. no one has to wrangle with the issues of using this code to design a X11 implentation on X because thats what it is, but for novice programmers like myself its an interesting chance to see how they linked it to the quartz engine, etc. i dont care about the license, im not going to incorporate any of this code in my commercial products, i merely want to see how it works (i guess my curiosity is jst a waste of time like that). the original post sees this, its about the greater good of having the code out period. - and thats all i can say, i feel like im beng drawn into an argument and not a discussion; its making feel dirty this early in the morning ;)
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
As much as I agree that Apple often sets cool computer hardware trends, I think that PC makers got the floppy thing right. Dropping the floppy is only now becoming feasible, as CDRW drives have sped up immensely, Rainier (or whatever its called) is coming, and people have had some time to not need their floppy drives any more (though I still know some people who rely on them). Gradually, they will become obsolete, but I think Apple jumped the gun.
Heck, when Apple first dropped the floppy drives they didn't even have burners in their boxes -- not exactly useful, if you ask me.
I stopped using the floppy drive years before Apple dumped them, aside from reinstalling old games. I also haven't owned a burner since '99, and don't really have a use for one. I just have zero need of removable media, and nowadays I have DSL and a 100MB iDisk, so I can send some pretty big files to anyone in the world, and even let others upload to it. I've a 5GB iPod, too, so there's no reason to burn music CD's.
I can't even recall the last time I booted off a CD. If the worst happens to my OS X partition, my OS 9 partition starts up instead, and I can do repairs from there. This happened to me once last year.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Wow, I guess there's just no accounting for taste.
-- thinkyhead software and media
So how long before Apple opens the source for Mac OS 9 - or at least the Mac OS 9 Finder? I'm sure there are plenty of APIs in there that were abandoned, from the TCP/IP stuff to the printing architecture. I'll bet there are a lot of geeks who would love to get their hands on Mac OS 9 and continue extending it, do some speed improvement, maybe bolt on a little pre-emptive MT, protected memory, and a real VM. I for one would love to hack the Finder into a standalone Carbon application to run under Mac OS X.
-- thinkyhead software and media
In the first place, Apple still uses OS 9 in the Classic layer of X.
In the second, they don't programmers to spend their time fiddling with a program that they're no longer trying to make money off of. They want you to work on X.
I was under the impression that X 4.x already was using hardware acceleration. Question: 1) What does Apple use as the Desktop Enviroment - is it X with Aqua as the WindowManager? 2) Can X apps (like Evolution, etc) now run together with Mac apps like Office X at the same time on the same desktop 3) Are these improvements that Apple made to X or where they already in X and now Apple is taking advantage of those features (basically, will the linux community get ahold of these improvements if Apple made some).
If they released it, people in the open source community would get to see a big Quartz application, solving problems they are familiar with. If the code were unusually pretty or slick, it might encourage others to get to know Quartz better, and to write their applications in a way that could more easily take advantage of it when ported. They would also eventually get the bug-stomping benefits of lots of eyeballs caressing their code.
The only reason I can see for them not to release the code would be that it uses uncommonly good generic window system algorithms that they don't want copied by others.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
What on earth do you do for backups?
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I haven't felt much need for backups, but .Mac offers a backup program, called Backup, appopriately enough, that backs up documents and a few other important files to my iDisk. Since I don't do much Office-type stuff, it doesn't take too much space.
I used to do full backups to CD-RW when I had a SCSI burner on my Performa 6400(2.4GB drive), but I never had to use them. I did some floppy based backups in my DOS days, and used it on occasion, when I had a 32MB hard drive!
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
At least you get updates for the same OS for free when you buy MS products, and they support OSes for typically over 5 years. They just dropped support for Windows 95 and NT.
Even if they didn't, that has nothing to do with how evil Apple is.
Your mentality is what keeps Democrats and Republicans in office - don't look at the bad stuff my guy did, some other guy from the other party did something worse!
Personally, I use those 160 GB firewire drives.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Always funny to see a six-digit id moron with bad grammar challenge an educated four-digit.
Learn to format your thoughts and your posts, you ignorant clod.
But why not buy a dual-CPU G4 box and use Linux on it. How much difference does Aqua make to a server?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
User #1200? Impressive. You've wasted quite a bit of time in front of a screen arguing nuances for hours only to have them slowly drift off of the main page and into obscurity. My you must be proud. Now what does the number 1200 mean to me? Off the top of my head it is just about the number of times ive been laid in the last 4 years (shes so beautiful I secretly consider her out of my league). Wake up and get outside. - You hardcore nerds really do live up to your reputations: as arrogant in your little world as you are inept in the real one.
oh by the way, its "grammar" with an 'a' you pretentious fuck.