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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.
All of Darwin's source is 'open' in the sense that you are free to view, modify, and recompile it at will (unless you refuse to their fairly liberal license). All of it will work in OS X. With 10.3, you may rebuild Darwin from source, then 'drag&drop' the propriatory junk on top, and it will work! It is no longer possible to do that with 10.4_x86 since the TPM-related stuff is not released.
An example of open-source compatible OS would be OpenVMS in my mind, which is, of course, closed-source, but very programmer-friendly. Darwin is definitely more open than that.
Sure, there must be ulterior motives for the 'openness', but right now it's pretty convenient, and sure as hell beats programming for Windows. I mean, how much of Windows' kernel source would someone like me get to see without shelling out some serious cash?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
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.
You're correct that that which makes OSX OSX is closed source, but it's not just the GUI. The whole Cocoa and Carbon API is closed. It's like Microsoft opensourcing the NT kernel and keeping Win32, DirectX, COM, .NET*, etc closed. It's fairly meaningless. OSX is "proprietary", period.
.NET is open as the Rotor code; I refer to the closed parts of .NET (WinForms, WinFX, etc).
* The CLR part of
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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?
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.