The GNU-Darwin World

proclus writes "The GNU-Darwin Distribution was founded to leverage the open source development dynamic and build the infrastructure for scientific computing on a new platform. Now GNU-Darwin is a major free software project, and the infrastructure, such as parallel computing and molecular graphics software is available to everyone via the web and on digital media discs. Check it out. Also, Apple has written up a story about it."

Comments

Re:I gave up on the Mac

[BrookHarty]

So this makes me wonder what the point is of using Darwin. With OS X as a whole, there are some specific benefits that exist. Apple has UI standards in place, provides some services, like iTunes, that you may want. They've done a lot of eye candy. But is there any real point in using Darwin alone versus, say, Linux? Or, if you specifically want BSD, then compare it to plain ol' FreeBSD. I mean, what's the point?

True, I wouldnt use Darwin either.

Linux and FreeBSD are my opensource distros of choice. But for Daily work, OSX gives me the power of *nix OS with all the same software. Throw in iTunes, and the nice collection of applications for OSX, its a hard OS to ignore if your a unix junkie.

And dont understimate eye-candy, KDE and Gnome look great, OSX looks perfect. Great time for opensource, pick your candy.

Re:Confusing...

[Halo1]

I mean, let me get this straight: GNU Darwin is the version of Darwin that the GNU project doesn't recommend?

GNU Darwin is simply Darwin with all BSD-lincensed programs (such as curl) replaced with GPL ones (wget) and a lot of extra programs (only GPL licensed ones obviously). It's still not a "pure" GPL system, as the kernel, most kernel extensions and probably some libraries will always be APSL (otherwise it wouldn't be Darwin anymore).

Re:I gave up on the Mac

[Senjaz]

If Apple hadn't stopped their cloning experiments which where at the time killing their own hardware sales then it's questionable whether Apple would still be here.

And we then we wouldn't have had Mac OS X. No Mac OS X, no darwin.

You have a valid point for most geeks, what's the point of using it over Linux or BSD.

One thing I will point out though is that it is a real boon having that entire layer of the OS open if your job is writing things like kext's and device drivers.