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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.
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.