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."

Comments

At least there'll be some profit

[dada21]

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.

Quite Frankly....

[Cherita Chen]

Quite Frankly, I'm not surprised... It is well known that the OpenID project (Open Intelligent Design) is far more promising. For those who don't know, there is now a beta version dubbed "Kansas" slated to be released around Christmas.

Stay tuned!

Re:Quite Frankly....

[BitwizeGHC]

Actually I think they'll be both trumped by the project affiliated with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Of course in some circles he is venerated as the Buoyant Spaghetti Deity; hence, OpenBSD.

Sad

[QuantumFTL]

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?

Re:Sad

[taybin]

This isn't the end of the darwinports project. That project was just hosted on the opendarwin servers.

Re:Sad

[QuantumFTL]

Thanks, I misunderstood the announcment. Still sad though, Apple should be giving more back to OSS - it owes much of its comeback to OSS (though not Free Software because it doesnt' seem to like GPL stuff much, like many corporations).

Re:Sad

[Weedlekin]

Ah, so BSD-style licenses explain why Apache, the various Mozilla projects, and Python have been total flops that nobody uses for anything.

Let's get real for a moment. Linux has become popular on servers for the same reason Java did, i.e. it generated a lot of press buzz, and has companies like IBM and HP pushing it to their customers (which they call "partners" to make things look cosy and pally). This means that the majority of corporate Linux setups (and by corporate, I mean any corporation, big or small) were chosen by people who don't know or care what the GPL is, have never heard of Stallman or the FSF, think a Gnu is a type of ungulate that lives in Africa, and would be happily using one of the BSDs if that was what their big "we take care of everything" hand-holding "partner" was telling them to use instead. Geeks within such companies have zero real-world input into any money based decision-making process, and use what they're told to use, hence the fact that Microsoft can sell them Windows and MS-Office for their their desktops, server-side Windows with Exchange for departmental services, Visual Studio for development, while Linux with Apache etc. live on their web server farms. If these people gave a fart about things like the GPL or what their pet geeks think is great, they wouldn't let anything from MS within a mile of their corporate buildings, and would be using open source tools to build their Linux-hosted webs instead of costly proprietary stuff like WebSphere and Tivoli, which are just incidentally supplied by those same "partners" who recommend, install, and support Linux.

The GPL is therefore no more relevant to Linux's success than a lack of it has been to the immeasurably greater success of Microsoft's products. It is popular on servers because it works, is free as in beer, leverages existing corporate UNIX expertise, and a lot of business people have heard of it thanks to their everything-including-the-kitchen-sink IT service "partners", whereas few have heard of the various BSD variants. By the same token, it is a flop on the desktop because, for far too many non-geeks without access to a geek, it doesn't work properly with the hardware they have, fails to leverage their (albeit minimal) expertise with other operating systems and software, and most consumers either haven't heard of it, or know the name but are extremely hazy about what it is.

Re:Sad

[squiggleslash]

This is the kind of nit-picking I hate on Slashdot. He didn't say "while avoiding giving anything back to the gcc project", he said "while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project". He qualified the word "anything", and you've responded as if he didn't.

Objective C was close to useless for the longest time in GCC, which adopted Apple's changes largely, I think, in the hope someone would make it a viable system in the future. A crude object framework consisting of just the Object class was added (note: not NSObject) and a small run-time, by independent (non-Apple) developers, but until GNUstep came along there was nothing you could really do with all of that unless you spent a few months developing a basic class library. Basic meaning pretty much "everything". No string classes, IO classes, or anything else, existed unless you chose to write it.

Sorry, but...

[megaditto]

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/

Re:Sorry, but...

[jcr]

Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.

They really missed the point. Darwin was never intended to be yet another open-source UNIX derivative like Linux or the BSDs. Its whole purpose was to make life a bit easier for people writing drivers for Mac OS X, so when they started beating their chests about how Apple was oppressing them, those of us in the Mac community bascially said: "Umm, who the fuck are you anyway, and why aren't you just using Mac OS X or Linux like a normal person would?"

-jcr

Re:Sad but not unexpected

[dominique_cimafranca]

Ah, so there's the problem. There were several missing link libraries.

Re:Apple has been pissing me off

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

blah I just hope more Apple users smarten up and switch to Linux or a real BSD system.

And I hope more users get over the whole macho thing and give up using an OS where every trivial little task becomes some monumental quest where you have to prove yourself worthy by constructing scripts, .rc files and kernel configurations, and switch from BSD and Linux to MacOSX. But that's just my opinion.

Don't fret.

[gklinger]

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.

Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool

[paulmer2003]

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.

Re:What a surprise...

[Shrithe]

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.

Re:BSD's fault.

[PCM2]

These licenses [X11, BSD, MIT] don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.

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.

Re:BSD's fault.

[evilviper]

they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.

Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.

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.

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.

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.

You're mistaken, Apple does release tons of code

[LKM]

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.

Uhm... You're mistaken. Some of Apple's open-sourced code:

• Darwin
• Darwin Streaming Server
• Bonjour
• WebKit
• Compiler Tools
• HeaderDoc
• OpenDirectory
• OpenPlay

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.

Re:What a surprise...

[Halo1]

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.

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...

Re:BSD's fault.

[Sam Ritchie]

...what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems?

GGP said:

Linux has not yet come close to hitting the tipping point on the desktop for the typical semi-technical user. With Apple's help, it would be much closer. With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.

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.

Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme

[jcr]

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