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. "

Comments

Sour Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Open source is/was the coolest thing about OSX. Without it, its just a pretty operating system with limited market share. Apple better not get too greedy - iPods won't be around forever.

OSX is overrated

[zymano]

We can build a better OS. Just add some accelerated graphics to bsd or linux and there you go .

Re:OSX is overrated

[HiThere]

You oversimplify, but I do consider KDE to be generally superior to OSX. (Not in many details, and certainly it needs to work better on my hardware to be as good, but generally.)

OTOH, the strength of OSX, like the strength of MSWind, is not in the OS, but in the available applications. That will require a lot more effort to repair. (Yes, it's constantly being worked on, and significant progress is made every year...I'd say every month, but there are cycles of regression.)

Still, just because *I* prefer KDE isn't any absolute standard of merit. Some people perfer Gnome, and they are right too. Some people prefer OSX. Some people even prefer MSWind. They are all right in recognizing what their preference is. (Sometimes I feel they don't fully realize the cost trade-offs inherent in their choice, but it's still their honest choice.)