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Mac OS X Intel Build Addresses Pirating
aardwolf64 writes "ThinkSecret has an article up detailing information about the newest Mac OS X 10.4.3 builds (which is currently said to fix almost 500 bugs with 10.4.2.) What is more interesting is the release of 10.4.2 (Intel) to developers. Universal binaries built with the new version (and apparently all subsequent versions) will not work on systems running the older version of the OS."
Is that really so surprising? That a company will act to protect its products from people who are blatantly pirating it and enacting workarounds to bypass whatever security might have been present to ensure it only worked on developer workstations?
Oh no, your pirated pre-release software can't be upgraded! Teh horror!
I'm sure when Rhapsody (the Pre-OSX betas just after the NeXT takeover) was being developed, that some of the same types of incompatibilities were there.
;)
Think about it though, most apps from 10.3 don't work properly in 10.2, but that doesn't mean it's apple's way of keeping pirates away. Since all these X86 versions are beta quality anyway, they're probably working on a much faster development mode, and things break easier.
Then again, they could be doing it on purpose, in which case they have the right, since it's their OS.
I was reading some publicly available Apple documentation on the transition to intel style chips, and they included a note that as of June they hadn't finalized their application-binary-interface (ABI) specification for MacOS X on intel. So, maybe it just means they changed the spec and now there's an incompatibility. It would be something most developers would never see, totally taken care of by the compiler, and a make clean and a recompile necessarily fixes everything.
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Erm-- This is a developer system. It's not finished. This isn't The Thing That'll Be Released Next Year, it's something cobbled together so that folks like me can make sure my software will work on the processor/hardware. It's not a live system that's being 'bugfixed', it's a development system that's actively being developed. That means it'll change. Binary file formats, linker specifics, etc. etc. We're not so much 'upgrading', we're keeping our aim focusssed on a moving target.
...also, having re-read your comment: where do you get the idea that anyone wants to maintain any sort of compatibility with the original 10.4.1 DTK? I mean, it's not like it's been released to the public or anything. Compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.4.1 is not required; compatibility with the intel build of OS X 10.2 will also have been broken, but you don't seem concerned about that...? Or do you think we should all maintain compatibility with the pirated copies of OS Xi 10.4.1?
(For the record, intel apps built under 10.4.1 still work using 10.4.2; I'd guess that new capabilities/functions were added to the intel dynamic linker, which gcc 4.0.1 uses)
Again, you seem to be labouring under a misapprehension here. Universal Binaries are what are technically known as 'fat' binaries. In other words, they are a file which contains more than one executable file concatenated together. In this case, it's a file which has the i386 binary and the ppc binary within it, padded to fit the encapsulated 'files' on filesystem block boundaries (4096 bytes) and with a header up front that says where they are.
I can't believe I'm having to say this on Slashdot of all places, but universal binaries are not some weird magical thing which runs the same binary code on two different processors. They're not like the bytecode generated for the Java Virtual Machine. They're just a way of storing the binary code & data for different architectures within a single file. That's all.
Oh, and want to see a shipping application compiled as a universal binary? Try BBEdit 8.2.3 (here are the release notes).