Slashdot Mirror
OpenDarwin Project Shutting Down
niabok writes "According to a message sent by Rob Braun to the OpenDarwin mailing lists, the OpenDarwin project will be shutting down, saying that 'OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and
moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.' The project's servers will remain online long enough to allow developers to move their various projects elsewhere."
I guess they needed more intelligent design.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
With a PageRank of 8 and an age of 4 years, that domain will sell to some SEO company very VERY fast. I wonder what they'll get for it.
Stay tuned!
I'm not fat, just big boned...
I personally use Fink (and love it, for all of its flaws), but it's sad to me to see a good alternative source for OSS on OS X bite the dust. The only reason I'm able to enjoy a proprietary OS like OS X is because of the availability of many of the best OSS packages (if not all), and the compatability this affords me with linux-based environments. Hopefully Gentoo on OS X will go somewhere - does anyone know how it stacks up against Fink right now?
Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.
Sure, they ported fink and some libs to Darwin, but that's pretty much it. ODP has been dorman for years, since 2002, pretty much.
Is Apple to blame for their luck of support? I do not think so; since they do have a neat thing going with http://developer.apple.com/opensource/
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Apple never supported the open source version of darwin in any way beyond lip services, some server space, and releasing source packages in mostly unbuildable form. They took from many open source projects but returned precious little to the community. At the end of the day Apple does what immediately benefits Apple. It's sad, but it's likely the threat of hacking OS X to run on white box computers likely is the greatest reason for Apple to not release vital parts of the latest OS X source code. Yet this will still happen. In the meantime, Linux continues to grow and become better all the time. There just was no need for OpenDarwin without Aqua. If all you want is a unix-like OS to run servers, Linux suits the bill just fine.
Well, I don't really get how much "open source" there is in Apple's effort. To me it looks more like "open-source compatible". In other words, with tools provided you can compile your open-source software (read: linux code) for Darwin. However I don't really see a full open-source effort. To me open-source means that you have to release the source one way or another, and Apple doesn't release any piece of source code. It's not enough to be based on FreeBSD to acquire the status of "Open-Source".
Sorry, this is another of those marketing schemes of Apple's. In fact it's one of the main reason I am staying away from it.
P.S. What is Microsoft did the same?
I wonder what will happen to DarwinPorts.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I wonder if they're afraid that people would try to use the opendarwin kernel with mac os x for intel to run the whole thing on any machine.
Smarten up...A real unix system...Linux/BSD is the only way...
As a Linux user of four years who has recently bought their first, personal, mac laptop I wish to call bullshit. I'd like to point out that OSX still plays a very important part in Linux development (less so in BSD) - specifically in regards to new features. Take for example xgl/compiz and xcompmgr which will be in full deployment for when Vista ships to compete with the M$ eye candy...Sure it only came into the lime light when Vistas beta's started shipping and the glory project status moved to them though without earlier projects like luminocity (etc) which was an attempt to add mac grade eye candy to Linux there wouldn't have been the ground work or the test case for this. And even now look at xcompmgr with transett or compiz - they just basically fashion themselves after inbuilt mac effects or 3rd party add ins that have existed for awhile under OSX.
On top of that mac make computers end users like and OSX Just Works(tm) which for a Linux user is really handy some days when Debian sid decides it wants to blow the heads off all the toys. It also interconnects flawlessly with my other Linux boxes through ssh, samba, nfs, vnc and everything I need (I use Fink for random unix tools I need).
Lastly OSX shows every day users that there are Real! alternatives to Windows that don't have the stigma of To Hard attached that they can try and enjoy. So really outside the RM ethos of everything should be open (to which, hypocritically in context of the above, I subscribe) there isn't really much reason for a mac user to smarten up and switch, try maybe, to Linux (and a mac user wouldn't touch BSD).
I ate your fish.
[Re: GNUStep]
I sometimes wonder why this isn't an ongoing project like Wine.
Well, basically, it's like this: the people who know enough to work on it are, for the most part just using Mac OS X, and most of the Linux crowd can't really tell the difference between GNUStep and Gnome (ie, they actually believe Gnome is good enough).
The upshot is that the contributors to GNUStep are a very small number indeed, and it's amazing how far they've gotten with so few people working on it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I started out using Fink but it never felt quite right. Then I tried DarwinPorts and I've been happy ever since. As a result, when I saw this story my first thought was, "What will happen to DarinPorts?" I checked the Darwinports Mailing List Archive and found this comforting post. To summarize, DarwinPorts is alive and well and will continue. Time to start using www.darwinports.org rather than www.opendarwin.org.
No need for amarok, just do this. ls * > ./playlist && mplayer -shuffle -playlist ./playlist
Or
ls */*.mp3 > ./playlist && mplayer -shuffle -playlist ./playlist :)
mplayer for life, bitches.
Somehow I don't think the end of OpenDarwin is going to mean Apple will stop lifting code from the BSDs. Why should it? BSD is not and never has been about creating a world seperate from commercial software. They're not "lifting" the code, they're using it according to it's liscence, which is something nearly every vendor, commerical or not, does, if only for OpenBSD's ssh implementation.
As the other reply said, Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel, they take stuff from the BSD userland as well as the GNU project, amongst others.
The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel", which itself used to rely on BSD code to fill in the gaps to make a fully functional Unix-like operating system. The Mach system is a direct decendant of what NeXT ran on its computers and came to Apple through the NeXT acquisition.
The reason apple is popular isn't because they have lot's of shiny ads. Okay, maybe that's one reason but microsoft has lots of shiny ads too. The reason apple is popular is because it is EASIER TO USE. Slashdotters often seem to forget that most of the world are not geeks and don't want to have to deal with making things work. With windows you actually have to solve your own problems and do work to get your computer to do what you want it to do. Macs just work, do a lot of your work for you, allow you to be lazy, and allow you to have almost no knowledge of computers. Macs may be slower, they may be uglier, they may be more expensive, but they don't make a non-geek's life a living hell the way a windows box does. Since the majority of the world consists of non-geeks, it is likely that most people would use macs if everything wasn't so currently entrenched in Microsoft's monopoly.
Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?
I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.
Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.
Breakfast served all day!
You should now find you have more than 5000 packaes instead of 1800 to choose from and the latest version oof PERL, Ruby, KDE etc. are all there. You will have to update all your old packages to use them though, with Fink you can either choose stable or unstable, not a mixture. Having said that I have over 1000 unstable Fink packages installed on this mac aand they work fine.
Happy finking.
That wasn't the point at all. The point is that Apple has been saying what great OSS supporters they are, and now they are even discontinuing the tiny bit of code sharing they have done.
There's nothing illegal or really wrong here... just more of Apple's slimy marketing tactics.
But hey, who can argue with the company who came out with the first 64-bit computer?!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Are you aware that Konqueror is GPL? And that KHTML is LGPL?
Maybe Apple chose FreeBSD for other reasons than the BSD license? I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix userland utils. If Apple really was anti GPL, they could've used Gecko as the MPL is closer to BSD style licenses than the GPL is.
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.
Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
They haven't failed. They've just found a way that doesn't work and leads to death. All part of the natural consequences of evolution.
Wrong. Try looking at the bsd subdirectory of the xnu source tree; it's not "just BSD" - it implements processes/threads atop Mach tasks/threads, and has IOKit for drivers - but it's recognizably based on BSD kernel code."
It still uses BSD code for that.
Uhm... You're mistaken. Some of Apple's open-sourced code:
And of course, there's more, in addition to all the other existing open source components which they use and contribute to.
There's even more which they don't release, and you can like that or not (it's a business decision to them), but you can't claim that they don't release code.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
Huh wuh? OpenDarwin was frozen out of the information and code required to remain relevant, but what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems? I don't see anyone talking about problems with linux here, after all linux is thriving and opendarwin is, well, deceased. Doesn't sound like a shortcoming to me.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No, they are not. Apple's code sharing has always happened via its own website. OpenDarwin was not run by Apple, although several Apple engineers supported and actively participated in its various projects.
That doesn't mean that it's sad that Apple has not been able to create a satisfactory policy which allowed external developers work directly on Darwin and contribute to it. It's not like they can't do it in general, as in case of the WebKit project some external developers even got direct commit access (which is more than what the OpenDarwin people wanted, afaik they just wanted their fixes to be incorporated by Apple).
I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...
Donate free food here
You'll be astonished at how little hoop-jumping is necessary on Linux these days.
:|
That there is still any hoop-jumping is a problem. And that there is now little hoop-jumping should not be cause for astonishment. I know the Linux user mindset - the kind of macho need to hack around in the terminal just to do something trivial like getting wireless working, converting WEP keys to hex with my bare hands - because I have been there myself, but now I just want to get on with my work (and my life) - Linux wastes too much of my time. Now, I should say that Ubuntu is making real progress and demonstrating that there is a recognition that 95% of the computer-using population see a computer likewise - as a tool to get things done - but it's not there yet. And for those of us that don't want to wait (because, again, we actually have stuff to get on with, or, say, want to use software that other people use, like Photoshop, Office, Dreamweaver), Mac OS X is the better choice.
Don't even get me started on Windows, mind...
iqu
GGP said:
This does sound to me like someone blaming BSD for Linux's (perceived) problems, and I agree with GP that it's a pretty sad assertion. I don't agree it's an attitude that can be generally attributed to 'extreme [GNU/]Linux zealots' - most I know would consider any negative opinion of the Linux desktop to be heresy, and any hypothetical Apple assistance would be derided as an undesirable dumbening of self-evident UI perfection.
This sig is false.
The pkgsrc project www.pkgsrc.org supports Mac OS X. The packages it contains are much more up to date than either Fink or DarwinPorts, and can also be used on a number of other Unix like operating systems. I bought a Mac at the beginning of the year, and intended to wipe the disk to install NetBSD. I ended up dual booting it because I found I liked Mac OS X so much, especially when I can use pkgsrc on it.
Yes, don't do it the hard way - you might learn something.
I thought so too, for good 5 years when I was supporting Linux without any doubts.
Then there came several harder weeks, when I just had to get my job done quickly and efficiently. And as different problems started popping up, I would spend 5-6 hours a time seeking a solution, fixing them, getting no actual work done. Sure I was learning a lot of new things, but things at hand were delayed.
Now typing this from WinXP. Because the Ubuntu I have installed has several usablity problems I just cannot get myself to solve, to dig deep enough in config files and docs, to spend another 2 days or so reconfiguring the system to get it to work like -I- want it, to learn the keyboard shortcuts to all the essentials etc. First, that's 2 days when I'm not doing things I want to do, but ones I'm forced to do. Second, in 3-4 years another desktop manager will come, or the one I'm using will get "updated" so much that I'll drop it, and all I learn will become useless again.
I've been using AfterStep on Linux for 5 years or so, it was cool, comfortable, very customizable and above all, ultra-fast. After some time, the project "maturing" added lots of hard-to-disable clutter (comfort gone), became rather slow (and my style of usage required it to be ultra-fast!) and stability from acceptable went to poor. About a week of exploring and intense learning of the configsm customizablity and such, becoming an expert of the desktop manager, went straight to hell when I decided enough is enough and simply dropped it. With Afterstep 2.x it died for me. I haven't found a desktop manager I'd like since then, and I tried really lots.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Qt is internally a work of art
This is precisely why GNUStep gets no traction: the Linux crowd actually believes that a cross-platform abortion like Qt is acceptable. Of course, this isn't surprising for a community that still hasn't admitted to itself what an abomination X11 is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Qt, a toolkit written in a language that Trolltech finds so deficient that they extended it, a language that has such a baroque library that Trolltech wrote their own. As for Glib and GTK+, I have been through a fair bit of the code, and it is a work of art. I'm not saying that the Qt code isn't a work of art, but your criticism of Glib/GTK+ is bullshit.
If anyone had been keeping up with Rob Braun's musings about Open Darwin and Apple's behavior with the OS community, this decision was simply not a matter of 'if' but 'when.' The following links below illustrate that this wasn't a spur-of-the-moment decision but rather the final straw:
A Brief History of Apple's Open Source Efforts
WebKit and Apple's Open Source Efforts
Those are just for starters. And to top it all off where Braun gets to the meat of the matter:
Why Darwin Failed
It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to figure out that the holdouts on the Darwin project have finally had it with Apple.
In a nutshell: Apple have never let anyone touch their code which is a twisted beige box-grade edition of FreeBSD. If something burps no one can help outside of Cupertino. Worse, Apple deliberately makes it nearly impossible to report bugs and allow for patches to be made. This extension of Jobs' secrecy policy is why some holes remain wide open while the rest of the *nix world have patched them a long time ago.
With OpenDarwin shutting down not too long after Apple closed down OSx86, Apple execs selling Apple shares all over the place, and the exodus of two former NeXT gurus, it isn't hard to see what path Apple and OS X are heading down.
Go ahead and mod me as a troll for preaching against the Gospel of Steve, but if key players both at Apple and in the developer community do not believe in OS X (or are giving up on it entirely), how can the rest of us do so?
(A) OpenDarwin wasn't run by Apple.
(B) Apple is sharing code both by distributing it directly and (occasionally) by having Mac OS engineers commit it directly into the FreeBSD tree. The latter means that people from Apple are doing all the adaption work to actually make the code directly usable by the upstream.
While I wish there was even more of (B), I blame the low level on inadequate tools - the version control systems in use make this a pain to do. That's also the reason for much of the divergence of Free/Net/OpenBSD.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
>they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.
;^) There, I said it. As I implied in my first post, I use OS X first, and get this, I use Windows second. I like Visual Basic. No, love VB for some tasks. I think C# is great. I know asp inside and out. I hate using C. I hate Perl. I hate *NIX. [These are slight overstatements.]
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
That's why I said that they "essentially". How many IE users know the code is based partially on Mosaic? Yet the "proper attrbution" is right there in the About box. MS took it, and now everyone considers it theirs. I haven't heard many blame the NCSA for winning the browser wars. That's essentially plagiarism. End of story.
>but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.
Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.
Two points:
1.) Sure GPL is altruistic. BSD is overly so, imo, because it allows itself to become exploited, as has happened with OS X. This doesn't happen with the, IMO, "less altruistic" GNU/Linux.
2.) I won't tell you how far your altruism can go, but I will give you my opinion how far it's smart to go to prevent your contribution from becoming what some might call exploited. This thread is, in large part, about Apple not providing enough to make Darwin a viable open source OS. Why could they based their entire OS on Darwin and not passively partner with a viable community of open source hackers? B/c of BSD.
>With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code
>has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.
Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.
Absolutely right, to a point. I'd rather see Apple have to pay for new development than steal from open source. No, I'd rather Apple feel the ethical, if not legal, obligation to give more back to the FreeBSD community. Sites like OpenDarwin should not have to struggle to stay afloat. People should not have to complain about unbuildable packages being released by Apple. Apple should take their place in the open source community more seriously. They haven't.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
I hate Linux.
This is precisely why I'd prefer Apple's millions in Darwin development had been given back to the community in a fashion that would have made both better. The GPL would have done that, as would a more ethical Apple. If you've got a better way of ensuring BSD doesn't short-circuit into one-way, lossy contributions to multi-national, billion dollar corporations, I'm ready to hear it.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
I say they'll muddle on for another year.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
C is syntactically and semantically poorly suited to object oriented programming, and it doesn't matter how much radioactive spider venom you pump into it it's never going to start swinging from building to building like some comic-book super hero. Even wrapping a powered exoskeleton around it is iffy, but at least there's some realistic hope that you can implement something that'll make the transition from the funny pages to the front page that way.
C++, of course, is the spider-man standin, and Objective C is our metaphorical iron man. I'd rather program in Javascript than either of them... at least Javascript is built around the object model from the start in a way that even Java (the "new spider man") hasn't managed.
What we really need is to for someone rip the dregs of Xerox PARC's ugly-sister user interface out of Smalltalk or Squeak and just use Objective C as a bridge to an open-source programming language that doesn't suck, but alas the Smalltalk crowd's got this horrible baby-duck fixation on the worst parts of the platform...
Even for an AC, this gets my vote for dumbest post of the week. Both OT and inane, and extra credit for throwing in Craigslist. Well done!
Well, you can optimize for hardware/software, or you can optimize for users. Users' tolerance for working in ways constrained by system limitations is diminishing - they expect the computer to work the way that is intuitive to them. We've got about a million times the power of computers 20 years ago. I think it's pretty obvious that the user argument is going to win here.
Constitutionally Correct
with the appropriate implementation, a case aware but case insensitive file system is essentially equivalent to a filesystem allowing only lowercase characters (but allowing for a display name including mixed case). this makes most of your issues go away (most operations just need to canonicalize the input filenames to the lowercase equivalent and then perform the operation as if the filesystem were case sensitive) completely as well as fixing a normal user searching for "foo*" as they may or may not remember exactly if the document is really "Foo*" or "fOo*" or some other variant. the only issue left is if the user really does want a case sensitive search for "foo*" as they know they have a lot of documents that are "Foo*" or "foo*" but only want the latter. this really isn't nearly as common as the first instance and should not be the case the system is optimized for.
when designing for a user, very very rarely (never) should you make something harder for the user but easier for the programmer. as many have already pointed out, most users really want case aware case insensitive filesystems.