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

Confusing...

[jbx]

GNU is open source.
Darwin is open source.
So... what exactly are we getting here? LinuxPPC is faster than Darwin, so if you wanted something closer to GNU than Darwin, wouldn't you use that?

What's the user benefit? This is for people who bought a Mac and don't want Apple's GUI work? Or is this all the stuff that Apple would like to put in Darwin, but can't, due to the GPL license?

Speaking of which, there's this:
Please note: GNU Project considers Darwin non-free software and therefore does not recommend the use of this operating system. (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html)

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

Can someone clear this up in plain English?

GNU-Darwin Background

[pudge]

This is the distribution that swore off PPC development because of political reasons, basically saying that Apple is so bad that they can't continue to use any part of the platform they are based on, but yet they are still producing that which they said they wouldn't (new stuff for PPC). They say silly things like "the most free" distribution, as if such a phrase has any meaning. They claim to be the premiere free software distribution for Mac OS X, which is plainly false, unless you are deluded into believing that only copylefted software is free software.

This is a project driven almost solely by politics, not technology, and they can't even be consistent there. Beware.

Re:GNU-Darwin Background - Pudge is right

[liyanage]

I absolutely agree with this and the parent post.

The politics and annoying GNU/GPL preaching on various mailing lists (and in the early days the insistence on installing/stomping onto Apple-supplied system parts in /usr/ instead of /usr/local) is what turned me off GNU-Darwin.

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.

Re:GNU-Darwin Background - Pudge is right

[Pathwalker]

Plus they are still running unchecked binaries right after they download them.

Take a look at their quickstart script, which they suggest that you use by piping it to csh as root.

The first few steps:

1. Download a compiled wget binary using curl
2. chmod 755 wget
3. put wget in /usr/local/bin
4. use the new wget to download some other code

They never check to see if the download was corrupted, or if someone had replaced it with something else.
Is it so hard to do something like:

...download wget...
if [ `cksum wget | cut -f1 -d\ ` != 2989954681 ]
then
echo "Someone is playing silly buggers..."
exit
fi
...install wget...

For each of the few programs and libraries that they need to download to get the package manager up and running?

I've complained about this before, and I'm sorry to have to do so again, but running an unverified binary as root right after you download it is one of the STUPIDEST ideas I have seen.

Re:GNU-Darwin Background - Pudge is right

[ProfKyne]

Guess that makes them eligible for the Darwin awards.