Slashdot Mirror
Darwin 7.0 Released
Trollaxor writes "The source code to Darwin 7.0, corresponding to the lower levels of Panther, is free for download less than 24 hours after the new Mac OS X v10.3 release! Check out the Darwin FAQ and the Darwin Q & A to get acquainted with this Open Source BSD operating system."
Sure, there's lots of goodies in Darwin that aren't in Linux. The most significant is Darwin Streaming Server, a/k/a QuickTime Streaming Server, which Apple has generously given back to the Open Source community. It's been ported to RedHat and other platforms since the first release of the source.
But more importantly, Darwin gives everyone access to the low level internals of OS X. I've seen several bug fixes come from Darwin coders and incorporated back to the main codestream. For example, in the early days of OS X, the SCSI code was broken so ElGato rewrote the SCSI kext and released it for free, giving guys like ME with legacy SCSI hardware a solution, until Apple could incorporate that fix into the next release. This may sound like it's just a way for Apple to capitalize on the work of the Open Source coders, but it's significant in that you don't have to wait for Apple to fix bugs. And isn't that supposed to be one of the big advantages of OSS?