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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 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!
Darwin is, and has been, two things: a bootable OS, and Apple's open source strategy with all of the open source projects and components in general.
All of the "Darwin" pieces that have always been open on PowerPC are still open on x86 with the exception of one notable item: the kernel. Most people who leveraged "Darwin" never even touched the kernel. Almost all of our any many other enterprise customers' usefulness comes from the open source OS components of Mac OS X and projects like WebKit, Open Directory, Darwin Streaming Server, etc.
For a time it appeared Apple had killed off everything but the GPL pieces of Darwin x86. However, that was a delay resulting from the fact there's basically one person at Apple packaging and setting up the sources for distribution. Since the subsequent release of the rest of the sources, Apple has done parity releases of all traditional Darwin components and projects on PPC and x86 - with the exception of the kernel.
In other words, the actual usefulness of what the vast majority of Apple open source users actually used "Darwin" for is still there. If you want to argue that its usefulness is all of a sudden severely crippled because the kernel is gone, well, in the enterprise community, one we found out that the rest of the sources would continue to be released on x86 as normal, the kernel being gone was barely a blip on our radar.
But hey, if people want to make a big deal and say "Mac OS X is now closed!" (what does that even mean?), let them.
99% of the computer using market doesn't read slashdot. Whether they care or not is of little relevance to this site.
Perhaps a better solution would be to deal with the piracy issue by, well, catering to a clear demand. What's better, 1,000,000 MacBook sales, and 10,000,000 people with illegal copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, or 1,000,000 MacBook sales, 2,000,000 people with paid-for, unsupported, $100 copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, and 8,000,000 illegal copies? If people are going to do it anyway, and they are, you might as well make some money from them.
If you don't think this would cut into their hardware sales, dilute their brand, and create angry customers despite the fact that it's 'unsupported' you don't understand the first thing about Apple's market.
If you want to run OS X unsupported on a PC then go ahead and pirate it, I'm sure Apple doesn't care. If you seriously want to run OS X then suck it up and buy a Mac. You need to stop deluding yourself and think critically about how its in Apple's interest to sell OS X for beige boxes. First of all, it's not a question of whether they'll lose hardware sales, it's a question of how much. Would they be able to make up the sales with OS X for Dells? Especially given the stability and support issues? Seems like a losing bet anyway you slice it
Look, Apple doesn't have a piracy problem. They don't have complicated DRM. They don't waste money on anti-piracy crusades. They just do a little obfuscation where its convenient, and it's working great for them.