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Will MacIntel Kill Apple Open Source Efforts?
An anonymous reader writes in to say that "Rob Braun (OpenDarwin core developer claims Apple's open source efforts are now dead, because Apple is afraid of assisting OSx86 piracy. First, Apple withheld the source of cctools required to to build Darwin. Now it seems they are no longer releasing the source to OS X's xnu kernel. "
I am not so certain that this is true, but if so, so what? The license allows for this. It was certain that apple did OSS while it benefits them, but not when it could hurt them.
I would guess that if they do not support OSS and it ends up hurting them, they will then do a Sun and re-open it. Sun did the same with Solaris X86.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ok, this one was a false alarm. Tomorrow it won't be. I laughed as much as the next slashdot reader when Dvorak made his silly prediction of Apple on Windows but after thinking about it I think he was probably right.
Think it through folks, there isn't anything in a Macintel that won't be in every Dell this time next year. EFI is the future, we all know BIOS is on the way out and the machines that ship with Vista will most likely be EFI with EPT instead of traditional partition tables. They will also very likely be totally legacy free, USB keyboard/mouse, only SATA drives, etc. In other words, almost identical to the current crop of Apple hardware. We already know Apple hardware will run Vista and it already runs Linux.
If you think Apple is going to have a hard time justifying the premium on their hardware you are right. But the bigger problem is going to be finding a response to customers who begin to dual boot their Macintel to gain access to all of the cheap hardware on the shelves at Walmart or online at Newegg. It is device support that is going to force the issue.
In the end, Apple doesn't care about the underlying OS. Mach was handy, they only need a substrate to run their desktop environment atop. Remember that NextStep was ported to Windows once already and that NT based systems are a small sorta microkernel with one or more subsystems sitting atop it. Win32 and now Vista's stuff are but two which have existed. There was a POSIX one and an OS/2 compatibility one also in the past. Sooner or later Steve will swollow his pride and create a subsystem consisting of a modernized POSIX and NextStep and that will be OS XI. It will also ship with all of the Vista subsystem. That will allow all the device installers to run and gain the ability to run all Windows apps besides. Which also solves the Microsoft Office availibility problem.
Democrat delenda est
Last July, Apple asked Anton Altaparmakov, lead developer of the Linux-NTFS project, to dual license the Linux-NTFS driver under the APL so that the Intel version of OS X can read/write files on Windows partitions (presumably for dual-boot computers). The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux. As one person put it:
This would open up a one-way street: towards OS X and away from GNU/Linux and any other OS based on the GPL.
Not to mention the Konqueror / Safari fiasco where Apple complied to the terms of the LGPL by the skin of their teeth, making it impossible for open source developers to port changes upstream.
In November, Apple has again tried to hijack Linux-NTFS code, this time by suggesting that it be licensed under the LGPL. This was promptly rejected by one main developer, who threatened lawsuits.