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Mac OS X Kernel Source Now Closed
littleghoti writes "Macworld is reporting that "Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code."
This is fantastic news! It means:
1) Whiney OS X Fanboys are no longer going to say "OS X is just as open as linux" (what a stupid argument that was anyway.
2) Whiney Anti-GPL Fanboys are no longer going to point at Darwin saying "see, Apple contributes back without being forced too - why does linux have to be GPLed?"
Me? I'm just going to wait and see how much the discussion changes from the rumour that Darwin was going to close source (see this guy for a typical example.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It was only a matter of time before Apple got pissed. If you didn't see this coming, it's time for new glasses.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
*Extremely* old news.
Also, "Mac OS X" has ALWAYS been proprietary. It's sensationalistic and shoddy journalism to say that "Mac OS X is now closed". Mac OS X has ALWAYS been closed. It's Darwin that has been open. And "Darwin" is more than a bootable OS: Darwin is Apple's open source strategy AND an OS; but the usefulness has always come from the open source components of the OS, not the usefulness of Darwin as an OS itself. Darwin's usefulness as an OS is, shall we say, "limited" at best, and always has been.
This has been beaten to death on the darwin-dev list, and there is no new information. Apple has taken no new recent action whatsoever, and in fact, the most recent action is that it has opened up more source code in the x86 tree, not less. Indeed, all of the traditional Darwin source with the notable exception of the kernel itself:
The thing that's not open in the x86 tree is xnu (the kernel), and it's not possible to create a fully bootable binary x86 Darwin OS, as it is for PPC. In the Darwin/OpenDarwin community, this has been discussed for months.
In fact, this article by Rob Braun (formerly of Apple, and a member of the OpenDarwin core team) was published in February 2006: http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html. This was then covered on slashdot, to which Rob issued this response: http://www.opendarwin.org/~bbraun/slashdot_respons e.html. These two discussions cover the issues very well.
I predict, however, that this Macworld UK article will be seen as "new news", and will be picked up by the tech outlets, and trumpeted, exactly as the headline hopes, as "Apple closes down OS X", even though the source for pretty much everything (except the kernel and drivers) is still available. In other words, everything that a normal person needs Darwin sources for is available. In 5 years, I can think of ONE instance where I looked to the kernel source for confirmation of something, and that was only for *confirmation*, and only because it was convenient - not because I needed to rebuild the kernel. I know of no other non-developer/programmer Mac OS X adminisrators/system engineers/enterprise users who have ever had any reason to rebuild the kernel or any drivers.
If the kernel and driver source were available, it would, however, be used for one purpose: to churn out hacks to get OS X to run on non-Apple hardware in a much faster and higher-quality way than has been possible to date. Will OS X be hacked anyway to run on non-Apple hardware, and will it continue to be, regardless? Yes. If people are willing to replace enough of the OS with the ugliness they're using to get it to work, absolutely. But it will continue to be ugly. Releasing kernel and driver source for the current iterations of OS X on x86 will only make their jobs infinitely easier, while brining little to no benefit to conventional users, power users, and administrators of OS X.
I'm sure people will find a way to make a huge deal about this, though, even though a huge deal has already been made about it in various forums, including slashdot and other tech news outlets, and on several of Apple's mailing lists.
I'd like to point out that this was my initial reaction: http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0602 &L=macenterprise&T=0&P=58970
Since then, Apple has posted all of the APSL sources, and it was just a legitimate, honest delay. The PPC and x86 trees are at virtual parity with the sole exception of the kernel and drivers. So I'd submit that "Apple closes down OS X" is highly inaccurate for two reasons:
- Most of OS X was never "open" to begin with; if he wants to say "Darwin", great, but I suppose "Apple closes down Darwin" wouldn't be as sensationalistic and guaranteed to get as many page v
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I like macs, but I now kinda hope that someone figures out how to prevent Apple from taking advantage of open source products like CUPS and Samba. F** them.
So, basically, without the spin.
... we suck.
... didn't want to run OS X anyway :-\
Apple: We can't seem to figure out how to stop people from taking our code and running it on none apple hardware
So, they close it up.
Awesome
Well, as most new Macs have a Treacherous Computing Module installed and Apple sure will use it to restrict their OS from being installed in generic boxes, this doesn't surprise me the least. It's only a matter of time before the TPM is used for other purposes, such as userland DRM.
I'm glad to hear it. I'm tired of hearing Apple's base is open source and that Linux should give up and other BS. This makes it much more clear. THANK YOU APPLE!
Pirates: Arrrrr! We'll be havin' your operating system now matey...
...we now know for sure that Apple isn;t going to make it's OS available for other hardware even if unsupported. Not that I can blame them--them being a hardware vendor and all--but it would have been cool if it was a more widely available OS choice.
At least it seemed it was more available than the so called "already open source" JAVA was.
Sigh.
Alas.
This seems a little narrow minded. I've always felt one of the strengths of *nix like operating systems is that ability to recompile for performance enhancements. Any chance of forking the code?
It's almost as though Apple are losing their relatively unique corporate personality. They have gone from their signature style on the Power architecture to a "plain" black Intel notebook computer. Their product names (MacBook vs. PowerBook) no longer roll off of the tongue.
Now they're beginning to alienate even their loyalists. If you aren't careful, Apple, people will begin to realize that you aren't a friendly, hip 23-year-old that talks to an aging man in a suit. They will know that you're just out to make money like the rest of the corporations.
(I love my G5 hardware.)
Does anyone out there aside from free software zealots truly care about this? I don't, and I do use and customize Linux kernels on other systems.
I want my desktop and laptop to work, period. Keeping them that way is Apple's problem. I pay the (really, not all that much once you compare apples to apples, so to speak) premium in price to get a system that I can plop on my desk and run without having to be constantly tweaking and hacking on it.
This might make a big splash here, but in the real world, nobody will truly care.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
What a great idea, closed source. Same thing that stoped Windows from being pirated.
Software pirates will just use IDA Pro instead of GCC to get the job done. The part they've always cared about (Don't Steal Mac OS.kext) was never open source anyway.
If Apple says that software pirates are the only reason, don't believe them.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
And now we know (well, we always knew) why Apple chose to use BSD
userland vs a GPL userland.
This should add more fuel to the debate of the merits of BSD vs GPL
lisencing.
*sigh* back to work...
But at the end of the day, Apple is a proprietary software vendor. Apple never was an open source company. But they did grasp how to utilize open source to their advantage, but it was always in a way that was really not quite in the spirit of the open source community. Yes the source code was always available for Darwin and the pieces of OS X. But rarely in patch form and often not buildable without tracking down internal header files. Working with Apple's build of OpenLDAP in Panther Server really soured me to Apple's commitment to Open Source. While the code was there, it was difficult to see just what they had changed and very hard to take their changes and apply them to the newer version of OpenLDAP. A great example of how you can use open source in a very closed way.
So this doesn't come as any surprise to me. And I really don't have any ill will towards Apple, as I understand their position they are in. But I don't agree with the position they have taken but that is their perogative.
Because as we all know, closed source software prevents piracy!
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Darwin is as open as it ever was, minus the kernel - and the kernel is only required if you want to make Darwin a bootable OS.
3 51035
Which is pretty much useless, and always has been.
Apple can still claim the same level of openness it always has, because all of Apple's open source Darwin components and projects (things like WebKit, etc.) are still open on x86 and PPC.
Take a look:
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/
See my post here for details:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185992&cid=15
Hello? Hi there. I'm 99% of the computer using market. I was just wondering why I should care about this.
/., and that /. is "supposed" to be for that 1% of the computer using market that speaks in lanquage the "norms" can't understand, but seriously would like to know why should I care? Thank you for the explanation.
And to the article sumbitter, I also do not care about your blog or how many "hits" you get so I will not click on your link. While I realize that this is
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I have to wonder if some group or other won't go back to the last open version of the kernel code and fork it into a new project or maybe some alternative to Darwin? Also, what does this mean for the Darwin project?
Would something like that even be worth it without some vendor support or tie-in? It seems a shame to let such a nice chunk of code go to waste.
Transistors and Beer!!
I've never found the attraction of Apple. Maybe for grandma or something (Then again, my grandmothers - both of them - have had windows laptops for 3 years now, haven't had an incident yet) But then again I'm the type that likes to build the computer from parts and triple boot and all else.
This development just reinforces the likelihood that the Mach(-ish) kernel is going away in 10.5. If I were Apple and planning on switching to a new in-house developed kernel, I'd most definitely want to clear myself of obligations of showing it to the world... at least at first until it's clear that the code is mostly clean, by which I mean fairly efficient and exploit/bug-free.
This is an awful lot of drama though if that were the case but trying to figure out Apple's true motivations is always a crap shoot.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
"If your OS is secured by keeping the code private, pray it's never, ever, released." Only takes one slip into the public to break that "security model."
Then there's those OSes that *assume* publicity of the source code and have different expectations for ensuring security. These "published" OSes also happen to be the "more secure" OSes available.
Go figure.
P.S. I'm not only referring to GPL'ed and BSD'ed OSes. There are other published OSes, the source of which are publicly accessible.
Disclosure: Mac OS X user here. Linux user here. Reluctant Windows user here.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
total agreement. Saying it was 'open source' was like saying "yes, the source code is written on a paper bag in pale brown ink. The last time anyone saw it, it was somewhere in Florida. So, you know, it's totally open."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
well, atleas the guards are stylish and sleek. not like those bloated guys in ill fitting uniforms at compUSA...
and then there's obviously the license under which it was available, OSX has never been OSI style Open Source software, you would never have been allowed to do anything much with the thing anyway.
The userland has nothing to do with it; people have been running GPL userland on proprietary kernels for years (decades?).
A man tried to steal products from an apple store, and was apprehended by security. I don't see how this is unexpected behavior.
Idiotic moderation ... your comment was the best explanation I've gotten in this thread so far as to what's going on and what is and isn't closed.
I can't really think of why anyone would want to run Darwin x86 without OS X either; we've already established that it's a worse server platform than Linux for most tasks, especially database ones, and headless servers are really the only place I think there'd be a market for Darwin. And it's not like there's any dearth of server OSes and distos these days anyway. The only other people are those who want to create a platform on which to do unauthorized ports of OS X onto commodity hardware (say by hacking the kernel to remove the hardware verification portions, and creating a foundation on which to run the proprietary portions of the Mac OS).
I figured this was inevitable all along. In fact, back when people were cooing over how folks had gotten OS X to boot on commodity hardware, I speculated that it was going to drive Apple to close up more and more of its OS, and I think if it continues, we're going to see a lot of phone-home type registration systems. To be perfectly honest, as someone who's always appreciated the fact that Mac OS has never had copy protection (because it depends on having a rather largish dongle, called a Mac), I would rather see Apple do what it needs to do to head off commodity ports with licensing than have them start to include obnoxious copy-protection in the OS itself that bothers legitimate users, a la Microsoft.
Normally I'm all for technological solutions rather than legal ones, but in this case the technological ones are going to be much more of a pain in my ass, so I'd appreciate it if they didn't. The day I have to type a serial number into Mac OS X so that it can phone home to Apple, I'm going to be pretty annoyed.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is speculation and until I hear an official quote from inside the loop, it's just not true. Apple might not be releasing XNU until they figure out EFI licensning issues or until they clean it up enough not to look like it was thrown together in 2 seconds. Who knows!?
And this had to happen the very same day i was planning to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code, oh well..
//WR
I know I'm in a minority, but I used Darwin/x86 quite a bit since it had NetInfo support so I could use it for shared login, and while I could switch to everything to LDAP, it wasn't worth the effort. I currently got an Intel Macintosh, but maybe my next purchase won't be a Mac, because I do/did use Darwin quite a bit. That being said, the Macworld UK article doesn't cite sources, so where is it getting this info? I still see the xnu sources on OpenDarwin's site:
http://darwinsource.opendarwin.org/10.4.6.ppc/
This signature was left intentionally blank.
I've never met anyone that *didn't* want to run OS X
One more here. Let's see how long we can get this list...
this sounds like the work of Microsoft!
I've never seen anyone run a pirated version of Linux...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
IMHO, this puts an end to the GPL vs BDS license flamewars.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Ain't nothing special about Apple products beyond a cute case and a marketed "cool" factor which for me personally are just two more reasons not to buy Apple. Apple doesn't stand for anything more than a healthy bottom line. It's all smoke and mirrors folks! And just for the record Steve Jobs isn't a revolutionary, he's a dick. Always has been always will be. Woz was the revolutionary if there was one and he left...why? Cause Steve Jobs is a meglomaniacle asshole. Mark this as a troll all you want. It just proves taht your are an Apple Fanboy.
Could chocolate be quiet and let me finish?
...Steve Ballmer is picking up a chair and smiling.
Does it also mean that there is ONE LESS OS that can be cited in the 15-year long kernel dispute between Andy Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds?
Every little bit helps!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Yeh, without BSD licensing they'd probably have had to go with something like BeOS for the kernel, or just keep using the NeXTstep kernel they already had an irrevocable license from AT&T for. It's not like the only alternatives were ever FreeBSD or Linux.
Yeah, I agree =P
More seriously, I work for a really small shop and have had reason to patch/tweak by hand the Linux and BSD kernel on occasion. It's been several years since I've had the necessity, but anyway... FWIW. In more serious shops that do real scientific computing and whatnot(or a place like Google), this does potentially eliminate OS X as a candidate for their datacenters.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
If they are locking the source down, I for one would hope that it might indicate making a move to solaris. Especially after the recent news that they were porting some of Solaris' file system over to MacOS, moving over to full solaris may leverage the best of unix and the mac os GUI system.
It's only the intel kernel and drovers that are closed source. Everything PPC is still completely open.
Honestly, the only people who have any need to ever recompile the kernel are using serious hardware. People running render farms on xserve or powermacs might want to tweak performance, but your macbook and imac users most likely won't.
Hey look, big shocker, the "pro" level systems where kernel tweaking will matter are still using PPC. Hey, even bigger shocker, the PPC source is still open. Let's wait until the entire product line is transitioned over to Intel systems before we jump to too many conclusions about what all of this means and what the future holds.
Good question. The only problem with continuing work on Darwin would be that any improvement you make could be taken by Apple into their proprietary kernel. Ok, no big news there.
To address the viability: I'm not familiar with Darwin (I've never compiled my own Mac kernel, nor used Darwin on x86), but speaking from Unix experience I'd say that there has to be some stable kernel API/syscall interface that you could clone either in a new development, or by continuing the Darwin source. The (closed) rest of Mac OS shouldn't notice if it runs on a non-apple kernel, because any syscalls could be emulated (there even used to be a Darwin-ppc emulation layer for NetBSD which could run some Mac apps! maybe we should adapt NetBSD to have a nice, BSD-licenced Darwin interface?).
I'm not sure exactly what aspects of Darwin/x86 prohibit building it. OTOH Darwin *used to* run on x86, so there has to be a functioning x86 layer for task switching, memory management, PCI, and stuff like that. OTOH, if they say that D/x86 doesn't compile, that means that D/ppc *does* compile, so that you could merge the current version of D/ppc with the hardware layer of older D/x86 kernels.
Sure, it'll be a hell of a lot of work, with the only real use being able to run Mac OS on non-apple machines (who needs their own kernel on a Mac?)... OR to merge this with GNUstep into a Mac OS clone à la ReacOS (for Windows).
If they did it would be appel.org
Hmmm... http://www.appel.org/
Anyway, precisely. Apple's business model is basically to be Sony (Expensive component systems that only talk to their own kind) but they get away with it because the stuff works in a way Sony only dreams, they have this ironclad against-the mainstream, shinyfunhappy thing going (sorta like VW), and they leave the most important points of generic interoperability (i.e. iTunes and iPods play MP3s) open. Darwin was not one of these.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Ah ... Steve Jobs strikes again. This is why I won't buy an iPod. I don't need to get enslaved to a DRM device no matter now "cool" people think it is.
The article and the blog linked to it are somewhat trollish since Mac OS X hasn't really had an open kernel for some time. Still, this doesn't affect end useres in the slightest. With the public sources, all that could be built for PowerPC anyway was Darwin which is another BSD derivative. It's not OS X...it doesn't have Quartz, QuickTime, Java, Aqua, the Dock, Carbon, or anything else that makes OS X the operating system that it is. Those components of OS X were never open source and never will be. Where Darwin shined, however, was in opening up the source for drivers.
Some drivers can be made in user space, but a lot of drivers need to be coded in kernel space. When OS X first came out years and years ago, the procedures for writing drivers was horrid. Even today, it's still easy when writing drivers to make a coding error and get a kernel panic. Each kernel panic has a bunch of stuff in the log that allows developers to trace back the problem that caused the kernel to crash.
On PowerPC, the source code for the underlying drivers is available. This is invaluable since not only do you have the point in your code where you have a crash, but you can also figure out what IOKit or the kernel was trying to do that caused the crash. Being able to see exactly how the driver family is using your device is very helpful in figuring out either how to work around your bug or how you can remove it.
With the Intel OS X drivers, however, there is no source. You can't look back and see what the kernel is trying to do that caused your driver to soil itself. This makes debugging a pain in the neck since now, instead of being able to try and figure it out for yourself, you need to get Apple involved if you need more information. Having the PowerPC source isn't sufficient since the drivers are different between x86 and PowerPC. Case in point: right now I'm developing a USB audio device that works just fine on PowerPC but the moment you plug it into an Intel based Mac the OS kernel panics. I suspect a div by zero in the x86 driver, but I can't verify that since I can't see the source. Instead I have to rely on Apple to tell me what to fix.
Thankfully starting with Tiger a number of the more obscure kernel interfaces are actually a bit more abstracted for dlils and the like for which in the past reading kernel code and other drivers was almost the only documentation. That's still no reason for getting rid of the sources.
Although this lack of source is no new development, it really doesn't affect end users. The only people really building custom kernels for running OS X are the XPostFacto guys for running OS X on legacy hardware or PowerPC accelerators, and they never needed x86 code anyway. It affects hardware developers like myself and can make debugging a pain in the neck, especially if you don't have any of those paid-for ADC tech support incidents left.
ed
Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system.
...
Shouldn't that be rephrased to :
Thanks to DRM, or rather the fear of them being cracked,
And, uuh... is the source code for the PowerPC kernel still open ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Rodney King, a convicted thief on parole, was caught speeding. He tried to attack the policemen who had stopped him, and tasers didn't have any effect on him - a sign that he was high on PCP. So they had to beat him into submission. Yet somehow the media only showed a tiny excerpt of the video, which made he look like a victim of police brutality!
Why were the policemen acquited? Because the jury saw the whole tape, not just the media's excerpt: what they saw was nothing but the correct, standard police procedure for situations of arrest resistance.
Since then, King has been arrested several times, for: drug infractions, spousal abuse, soliciting a prostitute and motoring offenses. He received $3.8 million in a civil suit against the LAPD, yet somehow managed to go completely bankrupt; now he lives in a drug rehab center.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I happen to like fixing kernel bugs. It's fun, and it makes the bugs go away. (not suggesting that Apple should delibrately add extra bugs just for the thrill of fixing them though) Kernel source is educational too.
Oh well. I can still judge a Mac on hardware alone, and then install Linux if I get a Mac. That's what I did last time I bought a computer.
It sure irritates me to see BSD groups actually helping proprietary vendors compete against open source. Thanks buddy. Stallman got at least one thing right.
When folks feel that its ok to steal because they don't believe in a way a company does business that company will be forced to take countermeasures.
I recall a few threads back an article linked to benchmarking the new Apple laptops, a dell running a hacked (read, stolen, a DVD image most likely DL'd from
any number of sites) copy of OS X was used as an example, this is both unfair to Dell (who I hate) and Apple (who I happen to like) the OS was configured to run properly on Apple hardware and by luck ran well enough on the Dell to run some basic benchmarks.
Apple has been submitting a large amount of code for nearly all of the OS that runs underneath their closed GUI (always has been closed) and this policy is sound for a company that attempts to make a profit, if it threatened their business model they would be foolish to release it and in the case of the gui it would threaten it to have others build the gui on linux or solaris or aix. Apple continues to submit source for items that do not compromise their business model, previous to the x86 move Apple had little concern regarding their OS/look/feel appearing on anything but Apple controlled hardware, it could be done (MOL as an example) but this was always out of the reach of the general population. With the move to x86 they have to rely on DRM (hate that too) to ensure that their profit (they're a hardware company?) continues as their OS is really only sold as an upgrade (not a full version like the folks from Redmond sell) and on the condition that you are running it in the environment for which it was designed (read the shrinkwrap license, which I also hate).
I would imagine that the module(s) for TPM are very cleanly written and very easy to defeat given a little effort and a recompile, if you've looked at any of the code Apple has released you'll know this to be true, with little to stop them we could be seeing HK and/or Chinese Macs (really they are already, almost all manufactured PC's are) rolling in for a bit less then Apple could afford to profit from.
As an open source advocate I am saddened to see this, as a stockholder I am quite happy.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
As stated before, this is old news. However, this site is posting some groundbreaking NEW news that affects the world of Apple. Check the date of the article in question...
This guy's the limit!
I've never met anyone that *didn't* want to run OS X.
Seriously, I don't want to run OSX, never did. Cross my heart.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Let me get this straight- one component of Darwin is closed source on one platform (just Intel). The rest of Darwin- the part that developers actually work on and need the source to- is still open, and according to other comments here that list is continuing to grow, and your response is to say that Apple might be worse than Microsoft?!? Please read the comments that preceeded yours (the ones posted by actual Darwin devs who are affected by this).
It seems that the only people who are getting wound up about this are the people who either don't like OS X to begin with or are reading the spin and missing the actual point.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
cause they are to cheap to buy linux!!!
Apple got pissed that people are running OSX on non-Apple hardware, so it "took its ball and went home." Apparently Apple still doesn't realise it's a software company.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Steve Jobs is really Linus' father!
Can Yoda (played by RMS) keep him too from being seduced by the dark side?
This is a bit ironic, given that in Linux, you can freely modify your source and how much does it cost you? Not a penny. Apple, like any other company, wants to protect their source, but you can't modify or let alone recompile it; and it costs you quite a bit to purchase, too. It's really starting to bother me that companies currently are hindering and annoying their legal purchasers instead of harming the pirates (such as Sony's Rootkit fiasco or Window's very annoying activation)
you would have seen there numbers have grown, to 6 or 7 and it looks like they have rocks
ahhhhh back to the cave nooo the zealots
What good is it without the kernel? Doesn't that make it just a bunch of BSD tools?
Or, as rewritten by Apple marketing for your black turtleneck wearing, latte-sipping Mac hipsters out there:
Apple is proud to announce QuickKernelTM, the completely revamped heart of Mac OS X. With patented, proprietaty innovations optimised for the high performance IntelTM Dual CoreTM architecture, QuickKernel is offered as an exlusive benefit to new Apple customers. Buy an Intel-based Macintosh today, and we'll throw in QuickKernelTM for free!
"We are excited to announce that we're making QuickKernelTM retroactively available to anyone who bought an Intel-based Mac within the past five years," CEO Steve Jobs said. "But act fast -- this free offer will not last long. We estimate QuickKernel adds at least $199 in raw speed enhancement to every Macintosh sold."
QuickKernel further boosts speed with its ClosedSourceTM architecture, which prevents performance hiccups caused by "credits," "comments" and "disclaimers" typically added to the "source code" of the open source kernel typically used to repair WindowsTM PCs. ClosedSource is delivered in a highly optimized UberBinaryTM format that is many times faster than the uncompiled source code delivered by "open source" operating system vendors.
"QuickKernel is the fastest way to deliver content to your iPod, greatly accelerating MP3 playback," Jobs said. "It also keeps your black shirt from fading in the wash, disappears scratches from your U2 EditionTM iPod and enhances the graphics on your Ruby on Rails blog."
Darwin, Evolution? Like it doesn't make sense. Darwin's evolution to closed source people! Gosh, some people can't see the darkness in the sunlight! :P
I damn well do expect to have the kernel source. I get it for Linux. Why not for every OS?
IMHO, actually hiding source of mass-market products should be as illegal as selling cars with the hood welded shut. Hidden source encourages abusive "phone home" crap. Hidden source lets proprietary vendors hide patent violations and stolen GPL code.
Mod parent +1 insightful.
He's hit the nail on the head.
*sigh* back to work...
I'm not sure if this was mentioned yet, but doesn't claiming OSS as your own violate the GPL? I thought the GPL exists to keep Open Source software Open Source. Isn't Apple going against it by taking something the was Open Source (Darwin) and now closing it? Are they going to pull a SCO and try to sue or collect liscense fees for source code that they already released publicly?
Is this new Darwin version COMPLETELY new, with no trace of GPL-protected code?
The excerpt was not tiny. It went on for quite a while. Even if the police were forced to beat him in submission, they didn't need to beat him for 30-60 seconds after he was in submission (I don't remember the actual time). At any point in the 'tiny excerpt' that was shown publicly an officer could have put handcuffs on the guy and ended it. Instead, they just kept taking turns beating him.
How crazy, criminal or drug addicted the guy was is irrelevant. Nobody deserves that treatment. And if we are going to go into character assasinations lets look into how this was but one out of many (many!) instances of LAPD brutality. The same police department that was named the country's most corrupt. The same one where several years ago many officers were dismissed and charged with things like planting evidence, theft and murder(!). Read about it here.
As people have already said, this is old news.
But, for people who care, here is the list of Darwin source packages are available for both x86 and ppc (as of OS X 10.4.6):
and here is the list of x86-only source packages
and here is the list of ppc-only source packages
If others take the kernel and try to write a higher level interface to it that runs Mac OS X applications, that's not piracy, that's competition. This is a really disappointing decision for a company that could have benefitted from this competition by adapting the ideas of the competition and by providing the kind of support their competition couldn't even come close to. Maybe when you decide to start running on 80x86, your brain gets twisted.
Yup the GPL rules. Cool license guys, it's so open they closed it ;).
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
That would be real cool.
That question has been asked and answered several times
Shareholders love losing millions of dollars in potential profits to pirating so they can say their just as open as Linux.
Now those five people will have nothing to do on friday night. Mind you that's just the few that actually care about the latest and greatest out of Apple, the other 15 or 20 will just keep mucking about with what they have.
b/c if they left the source open you'd begin to see all of the hooks they were building into the kernel... hooks that will eventually be used to allow the Windows Vista kernel to be dropped into place.
I used to have a huge crush on OS X, but that's before I went fully Linux on my laptop at home. Now, I'm just spoilt stupid by keyboard shortcuts, barely ever having to touch my mouse, and having my software mysteriously gain new functionality every time I 'apt-get upgrade'.
...
Seriously, I *might* eventualy be taken in my the prettiness of the laptops, but I *know* I'm dual-booting Debian on it. Although I hear you can run OS X inside X-windows on Linux on Macs
This Macworld writer is a fucking idiot. I'm willing to bet that the number of people who actually recompiled their kernel on Mac OS X can be counted on the fingers of, say, two hands. For that reason, this is a total non-issue. And as others have noted, this has been the case for quite a while and, well, most of the source is still open anyway.
:|
Would that we could concentrate on some real news for a change.
iqu
I wear plaid.
I have a long ponytail.
I have a lazy eye.
I could stand to lose a few pounds.
Pretty much all nerd here.
There's no reason for anyone to care about this while they're getting work done. If you've got a product that's going to do/enable you to do the work you need it for but you don't use it because of libre/gratis masturbation, you're ridiculous.
2k at home, xp on the road, osx for layout, linux and hpux in the server closet.
--- Do you believe in the day?
When folks feel that its ok to steal because they don't believe in a way a company does business that company will be forced to take countermeasures.
First of all, this step punishes a lot of people who have trusted Apple's commitment to open source and who have never stolen anything from Apple. This just reinforces the perception that Apple can't be trusted on open source issues.
What's particularly absurd about your statement is that Darwin is actually built on two open source projects in the first place: CMU's Mach and Berkeley BSD. It was questionable that NeXT made this code proprietary in the first place; Apple's open sourcing of their modifications was not generosity, it was merely doing what we expect of any user of open source software. Closing it again places them back in the category of companies that take a lot but give fairly little back.
Here's the problem, performance sucks relative to my Intel 20" iMac, it hangs frequently, and the network driver can't read the mac-addr. I also can't set the mac-address using ifconfig, so end result, is no networking. Screen resolution is also not able to match what the screen is capable of so the aspect ratio is wrong.
In short, while it's a cute hack and the novelty of seeing OS X running on Dell hardware is certainly nifty, it's far from production ready. Why did I dare to anger the Apple gods by trying to pirate OS X? I'm ok with it personally. I own 4 Mac's personally, have a G5 tower on my desk at work. My employer makes me carry this 20lb Dell around when I travel and I'm certainly not going to add weight by putting my powerbook in my luggage as well. So if I can have a few of the comforts of home-computing on the road with me, then I'll do it. It may not be completely legal, but I'm not taking any money out of anyone's pockets and I'm only using one instance of my OS X 86 license at a time.
Today I was thinking the Intel-based Mac Mini or the iMac seem rather appropriate to replace our noisy and voluminous desktop computers. However, I was worried about interoperability with Linux since we rely heavily on shared NFS partitions from several Linux servers. Given that most of the incompatibilities/limitations could be solved by tweaking the Mac OS X kernel, I was pretty sure interoperability was no more a concern. Now, I don't know.
Slashdot rails against Palladium nonstop for a matter of years when Microsoft is pushing Palladium as something they want to do. (And in what may just be a coincidence, as long as public pressure is on, Microsoft never actually manages to get Palladium adopted.) Then all of a sudden, Palladium crops up in all these new Macintoshes, but now that it's in fancy white plastic nobody minds, nobody cares, nobody even talks about it. Anyone left who's upset about the idea of the operating system vendor requiring you to use a chip which takes ultimate control of the machine out of the hands of the computer owner, and into the hands of the people who sold it to you? Anyone left who's not willing to support the future abuses of power that the mere presence of TPM in existing machines makes possible? One or two people? Oh, well you weren't going to buy it anyway you pirate.
Now that white plastic is involved, now all of a sudden the implicit spirit of "capitalism is a two-way negotiation, and the consumer is obligated to protect their interests by rejecting actions by producers which go to far" gives way to a new spirit of "TPM? What's that? Well, whatever. I'm sure software companies wouldn't do anything irresponsible. If you don't like it, then you don't have to use.. y'know.. a computer".
(Amusingly, through all of this the pirates aren't complaining about the TPM or the kernel source closing or anything, they're just going ahead and running the unrestricted pirated versions. What do they even have to complain about? They alone get the freedom to use their computers in the way they wish. There's this idea that you don't own your possessions, the people who sold them to you own them and they're just letting you use them as long as you live your life by the rules they demand, and this idea is one that only legal paying customers have to put up with.)
My dual g4 mac I'm posting on here is getting really, really old. I can probably stretch another couple of years of life out of it if I beef up the RAM some. After that I guess my next computer, for the first time since I got my first computer in 1986 or so, will be something other than an Apple. I don't really know or care what it is as long as it isn't running Windows, and doesn't have a TPM in it (or other chip in it that allows software to encrypt part of the computers internals to keep me from looking at it). Linux doesn't have any of the audio programs I need, doesn't have any of the image editing programs I need, can't run any of the Cocoa software I've written for private use, and doesn't have any developer platforms which even approach the elegance, speed of development, and usability of Cocoa in the first place. But the only choices the "free" market gives here are between being a criminal, being a slave, and being a miserable, freezing luddite eating bark in the woods. Option #3 is looking best right now.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
As a former Mac user, I hate Apple as much as anyone. But this guy was trying to steal their property. They were completely justified in wrestling him to the ground.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
That are open (http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/) and portable across BSD-compatible kernels anyway, yes.
So it's just about the kernel. Well, there used to be (working for some Mac apps, though alpha-quality!) Darwin-ppc emulation on NetBSD, not sure where it is right now, or how easily it could be ported to x86.
The pirates brought this on themselves. If you want to get mad at someone, get mad at Maxxus.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Sad to break this to you but Open Source doesn't mean "look but don't touch", nor "it's open only as long as it doesn't interfere with my business plans", or it would have made MS the champion of OS. (Stuff like MFC always came with sources. You just were forbidden to use them for anything that intereferes with MS's world domination, such as porting them to another OS.)
Open Source means you can take my code, port it to whatever you damn wish, fork it into whatever other purpose you damn wish, install it on competing hardware or on robotic sharks with lasers on their heads, pack it on your own distro CD and try to undercut the price of mine, etc. You may have to abide by some minimal restrictions, such as "but you can't turn my OSS into your closed source" (GPL) or "ffs, have some decency and do acknowledge the original authors" (BSD), but none really tells you on what hardware can you run it or with whom you can't compete.
Is it that great for Apple or any other corporation trying to build a monopoly out of interlocking pieces, to raise entry barriers? Well, no, in fact it's pretty bad to that end, because it lowers everyone's entry barriers. (E.g., if I wanted to compete with IBM's P5 computers, if they run Linux, it lowers my entry barriers because I can just recompile Linux for mine too. It just saved me from writing a whole OS. It's one less interlocking piece standing in my way.)
But as they say, if you can't stand the heat, then get the fuck out of the kitchen. It's that simple. If Apple can't stand OSS kind of competition, then it can stop pretending it's some great champion of OSS. It's that simple.
If it's just incomplete pieces you're supposed to look at and never use for anything competing with Apple's business plans, and which can be pulled out without notice if anyone ever actually figures out such a way to use them, just isn't OSS. It's just some corporate PR smoke-and-mirrors bullshit, trying to look all open without actually taking the risks associated with actually being open. What Apple tried to have there is neither "free as in speech" nor "free as in beer", but just a weird "free as in some meaningless buzzword that our PR drones can hype."
Hand-waving it as "bah, the normal users won't notice" is:
A) Irrelevant. I don't personally go through the Linux kernel or OpenOffice sources daily either, but the fact remains that I'm _free_ to. That's the crux of the whole issue. _If_ I ever actually need to hack some kernel driver to read my files off an old medium (I've actually had to, back in 2000), there's no corporate boss to decide for me "nah, you don't need to see those."
B) An incredible case of tunnel view. Just because users X and Y can't or won't read kernel sources, doesn't mean they can't benefit from the work of user Z who does. Even if I were Joe Average with zero programming knowledge, and unable to personally modify the kernel driver I've mentioned, then maybe someone else could do it for me. Maybe if I'm overly rich or some company or government agency, I can just hire someone who knows his/her way around that stuff. Maybe someone else had the same ancient drive and controller and had done that work already, so I just need to download it.
And, don't get me wrong, I'm not even telling you that you should choose OSS over closed, or whatever. If for you it's irrelevant because you personally haven't edited a kernel, sure, go ahead and make your own choices. But let's stop pretending that it's the apex of openness and transparency, because it ain't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
after the cattle done run off, but, given Apple's latest ad campaigns, I think it's smart to publicize closing the kernel off to ongoing inspection by those searching for security holes.
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
As long as they don't replace Bash with cmd and Fink and the other unix stuff still works I couldn't care less. Who the hell compiles from source anyway? Even in the Linux crowd those are only a few hardliners and powertweakers. And, curiously enough, the more 'technical' the distro, the less you actually need to compile yourself. I've never got anything better from my attempts at compiling than the Debian Kernels anyway. Besides, not having to deal with all the low-level crap and weedy custom-x86 module & driver junk in a modern usable unix is the whole point of having a Mac anyway.
Access to compilable source is a nice-to-have, but more in the sense of a nice-to-have CNC Cutter and the Datafiles to cut your own Motor for the car-model in your garage. Not that anyone driving a car would need that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is this new Darwin version COMPLETELY new, with no trace of GPL-protected code?
If you look at the Darwin source tree you will see that there are a number of components with "Other" licenses. Any GPL or LGPL code will be in these trees. A quick look through the first few "Other" entries finds Chess, JBoss, and MySQL, and of course gcc and its component parts are GPLed.
But just because something's GPLed doesn't mean it can't be used by or distributed with a proprietary kernel or OS. After all, Microsoft is inlcuding Interix in Windows Vista, and Interix ships with many of the same GPLed components as Darwin and Mac OS X such as gcc...
I think the MPAA had as much to do with this as Maxxus.
I expected this as soon as I heard the Intel hardware DRM support was included. As hard as strong DRM is, strong DRM on top of an open source kernel where an attacker can plant a "tap" anywhere under the user-kernel boundary out of sight of the application is virtually impossible.
So... the iTunes Video Store would ever be able to ship first-tier movies until Apple had some kind of equivalent of Microsoft's "trusted path", and that ain't going to happen with an open source kernel. Expect it in Leopard, for Intel Macs only.
Since Apple Tiger "is" FreeBSD. How complicated is it to make Apple OS X software function on BSD? I can buy a dual core CPU Intel 4.1 mhz computer for $500. I would love to switch to BSD running on the latter computer.
Ok, (probably) more than 1 of you.
But I think its safe to say that you are in the vast minority on this one. It seems to me that most people moved from Linux to OS X and not the other way around.
Just out of pure curiousity, what was it about OS X that pissed you off so much? And was Linux able to fix that, or was it a matter of just choosing Linux simply because you like it better?
OS X sure isn't perfect, but for my hard-earned buck and precious little free time, it sure beats the pants off Windows or Linux.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
So, the kernel isn't open source anymore. So, what? If a closed source kernel scares you that much, then it's your loss. Apple doesn't have to appeal to open source "fanboys" that refuse to have a single binary on their systems that hasn't gone through a custom compilation process.
To those guys, go back to your Gentoo boxes and shut up. We productive people that don't care where a binary comes from as long as it works and doesn't do anything malicious will go back to our work while you tweak your little compiler options and add little hacks and brag about how fast your system can go with your kernel modifications like a bunch of street racers.
If a system is good enough to use, use it. If not, and you can't change it, don't. For 99.999999% of the population, the stock kernel is enough; ironically, only 99% of the population is okay with that, so we have that 0.999999% that thinks they have to tweak everything when it really has no effect on their productivity.
Apple is giving SGI and Sun a perfect opportunity to step in and capture the market they are indeed alienating. Sun could do it far easier than SGI, but this would be a perfect time for SGI to recover from their near-death.
Many people chose Apple systems just because they were powerful, and weren't your typical grey-boxed Intel systems. The connection between the hardware and the software was superb.
What SGI could do is release a solid, affordable workstation. A MIPS-based solution would be nice, but perhaps Opteron-based systems would be more realistic.
While IRIX may be too obsolete at this point, they could go with FreeBSD and tune it specifically for their systems. There has been some indication from the FreeBSD developers that they're interested in targeting the desktop market. Even in its dismal financial state, SGI could help out the project quite a bit.
SGI could even market the systems as a modern-day Indy. Many people have very fond memories of working with SGI systems, and loving every minute of it. It's nearly the same kind of feeling many Apple users have for their systems.
Sun already has some workstations out, but they just can't seem to cater to the average user. Even when it comes to developers, many are uneasy because of the legal questions surrounding the use of Java and Solaris. SGI could get around that problem by using FreeBSD, and just dealing with your typical BSD license. It's quite well understood by developers, and without the uncertainty of Sun's license-of-the-day.
What would give you the impression that you should have the right to fork something you do not own and did not contribute anything to?
Given that nobody bothered to contribute to the XNU kernel when it was available, what makes you think someone would contribute to a fork? Technically, it might be possible to fork but in reality, you would have to publish any changes back to Apple anyway and assign them copyright under the APSL so your code branch would become a dead end quickly as they would release a kernel with any desirable changes you made as well as changes they made internally.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Oh Apple is so EVIL now. Oh they are so horrible. Oh Apple wants to make money off of their hard work and efforts!
We better start calling them "Big Apple", just like we label anything "Big" when they don't give us something for free. Like "Big Oil", etc.
Oh wait, "the Big Apple" is already taken.
Well let's just call them "Evil Apple"...
No one is forcing anyone to buy Apple products, or to use them. Just the same as with gasoline, cigarettes, etc.
Please go back to picking the leftovers from your lunch of Ramen noodles from your beard.
"piracy" is use purely for marketing, to convey a fight against unspecific bad things.
The real reasons for hiding the source completely are:
1. DRM - by the secret nature of DRM, algorithms need to be hidden and/or obscure.
2. Hardware control/monopoly - how could you force consumers to only use the OS with your hardware if it was open. Eventually the obvious port to common PC's would happen.
3. Software control/monopoly - combined with DRM for software itself, the software that runs or doesn't run on the OS, can be controlled. Being open would allow someone to remove such constraints.
No, it's not. It's an OS the UNIX core of which uses a lot of code from FreeBSD, but it's not FreeBSD.
You really don't get it. PCP shuts off the sensation of pain and gives the user a Superman complex. Remember the villain from The World Is Not Enough? Same principle.
its not theft! you are distorting the meaning of theft!
Plus they didn't cosh the shit out of him with 12 Cell Maglites
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Now people say that MacOS X was (is?) open source.
Then say that java has always been open source.
What people will say next?? That microsoft are creating licenses to open source their products even their Office formats??
If I were Apple and planning on switching to a new in-house developed kernel, I'd most definitely want to clear myself of obligations of showing it to the world... at least at first until it's clear that the code is mostly clean, by which I mean fairly efficient and exploit/bug-free.
I'd also be thinking along the terms of keeping under wraps, anything that a software patent troll might try to construe as a violation of their IP, since so many techniques that would need to be written into a modern multitasking x86 kernel to implement better performance and other useful features may very well be encumbered by evil software patents. Not that Apple would stoop to using someone else's patented software technique bits or pieces and try to keep it secret from the world or nothing like that.
I bet someone just showed them some trick to make a non mac generic box boot OSX easily, which would give aple a bad hair day. I am guessing this is a "horse escaped from the barn" maneuver.
Then why the big hub-bub about including ATI and NVidea drivers is various linux distros?
I didn't say "integrating proprietary code into a GPLed kernel is not an issue".
I said "Bundling GPLed code with a non-GPLed kernel or OS is not an issue".
The GPL doesn't cover "simple bundling". It even permits linking between GPLed and proprietary code so long as you're using open APIs that have appropriately licensed versions, so that the proprietary code is a derivitive work of the open API as opposed to a GPLed one. So gcc bundled with Mac OS X using UNIX APIs to call the OS doesn't require the OS to be GPLed.
The ATI and nVidia drivers, though, need to use Linux-only APIs, and that makes them derivitive works... so they need to be GPLed.
They do not want to compete with Dell boxes as a platform to run OSX?
I'm not saying he wasn't hepped up on drugs or that he was in agony. I'm saying that in the video he was not moving. Period. I could have put the handcuffs on him at that point.
from the O'Reilly Mac Dev centre:
I've read a number of posts that talk about being able to tweak the kernel for speed speed speed and now you can't with the x86 version of Darwin. Well, really, who did? Who took the time to install Darwin x86 and tweak the hell out of the kernel so that they could run whatever as fast as possible? And how did they deal with the lack of brainshare as opposed to Linux or even FreeBSD, the lack of tweaked configurations for compiling ("Hmm, what am I supposed to do with x86-UNKNOWN?")? Plus, if they were going balls-out for speed, what did they do for a compiler? I guess gcc was good enough and Intel's icc a non-starter.
The point I'm trying to make is that all Apple has done is make *one* flavor of Darwin non-Open Source. So there's only half as much warm-n-fuzzy feeling in this particular arena. BFD; if I want to squeeze insane performance out of my 8 processor 16 gig ram box, I'll consult any number of Linux sites that talk about this and have active, working communities behind it.
He may have hit something with his head.
Anyone who thinks that Mac OS X is capable of competing with FreeBSD where FreeBSD excels is either suffering from concussion or has never actually used Mac OS X and FreeBSD as servers.
Dude, look at his URL. You think a Republican can understand complex shit like that?
XServe is still PPC, so XServe's kernel (XNU PPC) is still avaliable. Don't put the cart before the horse
It doesn't matter if the XServe kernel is available or not. Mach based kernels are not going to ever be speed demons: Mach's the posterboy for "how not to implement a microkernel" and so Mac OS X has simply got a lot more overhead than FreeBSD or Linux.
If you really want to get high performance out of an Apple server... regardless of whether it's a G5 or a G5 or Intel Core... you're not going to be tweaking XNU... you're going to be replacing the kernel completely with something a lot lighter.
Too bad the Open Source crowd is moving away from GNUstep based programs like Windowmaker to the Windows-clone Gnome and KDE desktops. :(
This is old news if you subscribe to a ton of mailing lists, but it never hit the trade press much. A lot of journalists assumed the lack of a class of users who would be concerned with this issue. I'm happy to see that at least one journalist is doing their job and airing a potentially controversial issue, sensational or otherwise.
BSD started out as a bunch of tools, then they made their own kernel.
If there is demand then somebody will make an open source kernel to run instead, which would only get you the tools... Just use FreeBSD and port the few tools that are different over there.
Unless they replace MS, I don't see anybody trying to make a kernel when its easier to port the few useful parts to other OS.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It looks like OS X is taking a few tips from the 80s. Most Unix developers are accustomed to having access to the source code for the system; this dates back to the mid-1970s when universities bought Unix licenses from AT&T including source code to study. This practice ended in the 1980s when source code licenses from AT&T started to cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, we get BSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and even the original Unix sources (from Caldera). Having access to the source code of the kernel is useful for understanding how the system works, creating device drivers, and optimizing the performance (research experiments, for example). Removing the kernel source code is a loss. As a FreeBSD user, closed-source Unix just doesn't make sense to me, and this removes one incentive of the Mac (although I'm still planning on getting one).
Then again, NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were completely closed source (but that was due to AT&T licensing; BSD wasn't fully unencumbered until about 1994), so I guess most NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who switched to the Mac have no concept of having access to source code.
It is even more entertaining to see Mac zelots having to do a complete 180 again. Only a couple of days ago, Mac users would post arguments like these:
So basically until recently, it was
I still remember the time, when some Apple users wanted to convince me that nobody needs multitasking and multiuser, for these features would be to confusing anyway.
Oh well, there goes my karma.
Except that implementing a "full Windows API" would be EASIER on top of Mach than on top of some *BSD.
Mach is designed to host multiple API flavors, BSD is not. That's why they were able to bring out OS X with **FIVE** fully implemented "APIs"
*Classic
*Carbon
*Cocoa
*Java
*BSD
Trying to weld Win32 onto the BSD kernal and still maintain backwards compatability with their other **FOUR** APIs would be lunacy. And really, the fact that you're quoting a known troll (Cringely) makes you sound a little trollish, but hey, I bit, whatever.
"Thanks to the DRM subsystem Apple is now forced to close access to the source of OS X for the Intel platform" instead of "Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system." ?
Why else should they close only the Intel version ?
--
This is an emulated sig...
So, is this why Goto is considered harmful?
[rimshot]
Sean
If they meant by "FreeBSD based" anything other than "some of the code in the Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD code", they were wrong. Take a look at the FreeBSD kernel and xnu source if you don't believe me. For one thing, FreeBSD has no "osfmk" subdirectory, full of Mach code that implements Mach messaging and Mach tasks/threads (atop which BSD processes and pthreads are built in xnu) - and some of the OS X frameworks use Mach messaging, as do some of the OS X daemons (both open-source and closed-source).
...which has no bearing on how "easy" it'd be to port Apple software over to FreeBSD.
The problem with your theory is I WOULD buy a Dell with OS X (preferably tri-boot with Windows and Linux), I wouldn't buy a Mac that just booted Windows. And yes Mac "fan boi" with a PPC iBook, G5 Tower, and ipod nano. And yes for the record I am disappointed Apple has closed the source of the kernel. I would like to see Apple preserve our freedom as much as possible while preserving it's just works gui, and ability to detect peripherals without having to load modules or tweak config files like Linux or the open BSDs.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
It looks like OS X is taking a few tips from the 80s.
What, unbundling the documentation tools and the compilers and even the man pages, and selling them back to you for outrageous prices?
No?
Most Unix developers are accustomed to having access to the source code for the system;
Even when I was at Berkeley working on 4BSD that wasn't true. Only the CSRG guys had access to that source, everyone else was stuck with (if they were lucky) photocopies of the Lyons book.
Having access to the source code of the kernel is useful for understanding how the system works,
Yep, and you still have that. You don't have the x86-specific stuff, but you have everything else. And there just isn't that huge a difference between systems... hell, I was debugging Digital UNIX kernel problems by referring to the FreeBSD sources in the '90s, and the differences between XNU PPC and XNU x86 are trivial by comparison.
As a FreeBSD user, closed-source Unix just doesn't make sense to me
Then stick with FreeBSD.
As a former FreeBSD committer and 386BSD patchkit maintainer, I'll continue to use the best tools I have available: Mac OS X on the desktop and FreeBSD in the server room.
Its okay to make it closed source. This is, after all, Apple. They can do no wrong.
Now, if it had been any other company, Slashdotters would be demanding public hangings at dawn...
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
This is really odd news but probably something to just quietly watch without screaming about how Apple betrayed all the OSX users or some stuff like that.
Apple will be serving as the lab rat for Open versus Closed source development. It will be interesting to see if they do anything which drives home anyones point.
Re: "easy". That was the $64,000 question I asking about. For someone who is an expert (like So Sue Me Jon) - could it be done? I would invest in a software venture that did it.
Both the slashdot headline and article (sorry, opinion piece) are pure speculation.
There is nothing new here, this has been the state of things for a while, no official announcement from Apple on this, and therefore no need to post such a piece with the sensationalist headline, as if this had just happened. So please check your facts before posting them as truth...
"Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
.. Right..?
Apple's first attempt at comedy of epic scales. Let me rehash that one:
"Thanks to terrorists, or rather the fear of them, now NSA spies your phone calls".
Excuses, excuses...
By the way, let's hope closing the source will help, just like it helps Microsoft with Windows - noone is pirating or hacking Windows, right?
With 433 posted comments, it's probably way too late to comment on this story. But it's surprising to me that no one has looked at this from the DRM angle yet. One of the major threats against things like disc-to-screen locking of content is that the XNU DRM tie-ins have only a tenuous hold at best as long as you can hack and install your own kernel. Now they can make it that much harder to do that. With a TPM present in most Intel Macs, most of the pieces are now in place, and Apple can blithly point a finger to the pirates, if they even need to. Hmm, pointing at pirates to explain your actions.. sounds familiar. :P
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
So... Apple is a government now?
Does fascism apply to corporations?
Also - got any idea why the man was wrestled to the ground? Any clue?
Pirates: I'se the b'y who'll gladly fork the last open cod if ye'll fry er first, matey. Arrg.
Pirates attack ships at sea.
It does everybody a disservice to call copyright infringers with a term that is used for actual crimes. In fact, the DMCA does in fact make you a criminal in some copyright infringement issues, but that is just stupid. In fact, the choice of the word 'pirate' is convenient for the people who like restricted distrbution, because it implies that copyright infringers are criminals, and that kind of concept grows in people.
Physically grabbing someone else's property and trying to run away is about as close to the textbook definition of theft as we can get.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Some Apple fans just get over-excited, that's well known. Closing the kernel source is simply a measure to keep out the riff-raff.
Blank until
You don't have a beard??? Where's your honour??
Real men don't write sigs
Another and probably better client for DC++ is Valknut, available for both OSX 10.3 panther and 10.4 Tiger here is the Mac precompiled binaries. I have used it for several months without a problem. Im told the linux client is equally good. http://folk.ntnu.no/chrisj/download/ another DC++ site of intrest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valknut_(software)
There not worried about pirates.. This is just an excuse so they will close up their source.. Its going to be pirated regardless of it being open source of closed source.. If MAC really wanted to stop pirates then they would mac there OS check to see if its running on MAC hardware.. They have been planning this closed source thing since day 1
And when you're an asshat like RMS, you're not helping anyone.
The GPL has done wonderful things for the open computing community. You can be an asshat and do great things - Fred Rogers is the exception, not the rule.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The answer is "no", especially if you have to re-implement all of the frameworks Mac applications use (heck, reimplementing it atop Darwin would be a significant amount of work, and you already have Mach messaging, at least some of the OS X daemons, and the additional system calls such as getattrlist(), getdirentriesattr(), exchangedata(), etc. if you're reimplementing it atop Darwin).
First of all, it's not a question of whether they'll lose hardware sales, it's a question of how much.
I've stuck with Macs for a very long time now, through thick and thin, despite becoming a linux proponent because they went the open source route. As problems arose with the base system (not too concerned with GUI apps for most of my business) I and others could look at the source, find the fix, send it to Apple, and all was well with the world.
This has ended. I'm typing this on an iBook G4 that was ready to be replaced with a MacBook until they announced the high-glare screens. Now OSX has gone closed source. Meanwhile Linux has matured immensely and the community plays by the rules I find most cost effective and socially responsible.
So, I'll probably keep my Mini for iLife apps for a while and this iBook will trickle down to my wife for her light-weight internet usage, but I'm probably going to get somebody else's Core2 laptop when they ship. Apple was fond of saying they were in possession of the minds of the Alpha Geeks a few years ago since as they went so followed the herd. We'll see how things shake out over the next few years. And that might affect their hardware sales.
I still think that the Intel move is Apple's first step into getting out of the hardware business given what we know about the PPC evolution, the battery life of the new "high performance per watt" machines, using stock Intel reference designs, etc. The PC industry is slow to change, but some vendors are beginning to kick out gear Apple could consider certifying. After all, Steve Jobs must know by now if he's going after Microsoft's business he can't be selling low-margin goods while Microsoft is printing money. I'm just going to be a bit ahead of their curve a bit here I think.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Apple is shutting the door to porting OS X to a regular ole PC by fans who like the OS but don't care about the pricey apple hardware.
You are a complete whack job. I never new the new freedom was slavery. I should read 1984 more often.
The question is perfectly valid - what difference does this make to the majority of end users?
I think it makes no difference at all, but we could at least open it up for discussion.
If MAC really wanted to stop pirates then they would mac there OS check to see if its running on MAC hardware..
First of all, it's "Mac", not "MAC"-- it's not a fucking acronym, idiot.
Secondly, Macs are made by Apple, not MAC. MAC makes cosmetics.
Third, the Intel version of OS X DOES check to make sure it's running on Apple hardware. All the hacks to get OS X running on generic hardware involve either removing, bypassing or otherwise fooling Intel's TPM module that the Intel Macs use to verify that the hardware is a real Mac.
Next time, try to know what the fuck you're talking about, mmkay? Thanks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Now that MacOS has been ported to Intel there must be a distinct motivation to use, incorporate, and perhaps modify, x86 software which has been written elsewhere, possibly by one of Apple's minority shareholders. Those shareholders are distinctly allergic to any licence which includes the letters e, n, p, and o adjacent to each other in a single word. Remember that Redmond has to have a viable competitor to look ok under the agreement with the DoJ. Thus Darwin has to be closed. Bunch of kids chucking sand at each other. Smallest one has to run away to avoid sand in eye.
Yeah he was caught saying "Dell is better!" or "Steve Jobs is gay!" and the security guards wrestled him to the ground and beat on him. The whole theft thing is a cover-up.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Funny how Microsoft's shipping open source code themselves, isn't it?
I just had to comment on your sig.
"Libertarians are really properly called propertyarians and when push comes to shove value material things over liberty."
Except that one of the tenets of Libertarianism is that we "own" ourselves. Thus the liberty.
If you don't own yourself how can you possibly ever have Liberty? If you don't own _any_ property, how can you have Liberty?
And if a corporation owns you for 2/3rds of your waking hours, spies on your typing, photographs you in the bathroom, and fires you at will because they can hire someone in India to do your job for 10/hr what sort of freedom is that? The freedom to be spied on and then left living in your car due to a shift in the global market? I'll pass on that "freedom," thanks...
And no I don't think the state is the answer either, I think unions and co-ops are the answer, screw BOTH the centralized state and the centralized corporations. The best way to own yourself is to not directly contract your life away to the whim of corporate CEOs as a disempowered individual in contract negotiations, or to be a corporation owner yourself who presumes to own others lives during their work day. Neither slave, nor slave owner, that is true freedom and not just some Anne Randian abstraction that Libertarians use to rationalize their greedy unsustainable lifestyles as cheap labor conservatives who want to build their mini mansions in the middle of some pristine forest.
And yes I will feel extreme schadenfreude when oil scarcity dries up the gas for your SUVs, makes the fat burgers disappear, and leaves you in a cold, dark, unheated mini mansion with no army of servants to tend to your every whim.
Yep -1 offtopic troll and -1 for the offtopic parent too I've got karma to burn baby, bring it on...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Personally I don't see the netgain for Mac users from Apple letting copies of MacOS X work only on its computers. The argument that most people on here use, that the last time they tried a clone effort it killed Apple, shows exactly how little people remember about the go-go days when you could grab a UMAX PPC clone that could wipe the floor with an Apple computer, and how much Apple was responsible for its own mismanagement, namely trying to stay in the hardware business while selling licenses for clones. If they were to sell OS X to anyone who wanted it they would have to get out of the computer hardware business pronto. Will this happen? No. I think Apple is quite content to be a "boutique" hardware maker. But at the same time that cache of cool that they've built up with slick ad's and impressive storefronts will only be maintained as long as their image is maintained that they are "innovative" and have things that other OS' dream about. But that, in reality, is bumpkis. There is nothing that Mac OS X does that can't be replicated on any other OS, including the free ones (Linux, the BSD's, etc), or isn't already there, and the main thing holding back those other OS from tearing Apple's market share to shreds is a lack of certain flagship applications (Adobe/Macromedia, Quicken, etc), ease of use issues (which are quickly being taken care of), and a united advertising/marketing front (even Linspire, the most desktop concious distro has yet to push a big mass media effort to get Linux out there). Without the very cultivated sense of "cool" and "hip" that Apple has, people would realize very quickly that they can get similar, if not better on other OS' with far cheaper hardware choices.
The prevailing view of pirates (the nautical kind), overwhelmingly, is that they're 'cool'. When was the last time you saw a movie advertised with pirates portrayed as vicious, brutal murdering sons-of-bitches? Now when was the last time you saw them portrayed as cheerful, happy-go-lucky scalawags who only preyed upon the unjust?
Feh. If you ask me, calling illegal copying 'piracy' in this day and age is whitewashing it.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The inefficiency in Mac OS X, in my experience, is largely in creating new threads/processes. It's horrible, even compared to Windows (threads... it's not as bad as creating a new process on Windows). Thus, if you're running (say) MySQL or Postgres, each of which depends heavily on creating and destroying new threads or processes really quickly (and each of which takes heavy advantage of it basically being free on Linux), the performance is hideous. Hideous. The performance of things that don't do that all the time are actually not bad, though they aren't up to the level of Linux. (Admittedly, this was also based on PPC machines; I haven't gotten to play much with the Intel Macs yet.)
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
With the public sources, all that could be built for PowerPC anyway was Darwin which is another BSD derivative. It's not OS X...it doesn't have Quartz, QuickTime, Java, Aqua, the Dock, Carbon, or anything else that makes OS X the operating system that it is. Those components of OS X were never open source and never will be. Where Darwin shined, however, was in opening up the source for drivers.
...
Darwin is Mac OSX... ^^
or should I say: Mac OSX is Darwin...
The thing here is that Mac OSX ain't operating system. It's just a name for a software collection consisting of operating system called Darwin OS and some nifty libraries and programs: Quartz, QuickTime, Java, Aqua, the Dock, Carbon
And Darwin OS happens to use XNU as well as it's kernel. So since Apple will close down XNU open development it won't be possible for 'free' Darwin to survive unless Apple continues to release newer sources for the kernel.
But it doesn't matter anyway since Apple has failed to prove it's software 'open' anyway. Building Apple Darwin is pain in...
-Seeing the problem is ½ of solution-
Piracy is also a well established term for illegal reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material. According to Wikipedia the first use of the term is in 1879, and the term accurately conveys the intended meaning of infringement. The term "copyright theft" is much more problematic because its plain meaning is not synonymous with infringement, even though the RIAA attempts to use it that way.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Nuff Said!
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...