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

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: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: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.

[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: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.