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iPhone Not Running OS X
rochlin writes "We know that Steve Jobs has said the iPhone won't accept third-party apps. The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not like Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way). An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application / video cpu. So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? Not Linux or the source would need to be open."
Surely Apple's free to do what they want with their source code, unless it OSX is substantially based on code from elsewhere.
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Open Source Sysadmin
Last things first: Apple doesn't have to abide by the APSL with respect to their own code.
Second, if it's "OS X" on PPC, and "OS X" on Intel, why wouldn't it be "OS X" on ARM? It could well come from the very same code base, simply an unreleased branch.
I think you are a bit confused. The license holders, in this case Apple, have the right to license out their works to people in an agreement that defines what the licensees can do with Apple's product. The "Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement" you quote is just this, Apple's agreement with whoever wants to use it. Apple, being the owners of the Mac OS X, can do whatever they'd like with Mac OS X because they own the rights. We, on the other hand, are only licensing it.
hackers of the world unite!
beacuse NetBSD already runs on ARM perhaps? They have their own coders to do what ever they need inhouse anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think you are confusing OSX with Mac OSX. Mac OSX is the OS that Apple sell and put on their computers. At no point in the Keynote or after has anyone said that the iPhone runs Mac OSX. They have simply said that it runs OSX. To my mind this means that it is running a subset of Mac OSX. At the very least the iPhone OSX appears to be missing Carbon (no loss to me), the Finder and other "built in" apps and quite possibly Quicktime. Whilst Steve said it had Cocoa that normally just refferrs to the main Kits: Foundation and the App Kit. This does not include PDFKit, QTKit and so on.
Whether is's based off Darwin or not is hard to say. At a certain level that does not matter. What would matter if Apple decide to open up to third part developers is the APIs that are available. There may be a small subset that want POSIX on their phone but for actual application development Cocoa with some custom PhoneKit is probably all that is important.
No the parent is right. There is very little GPL or otherwise copyleft code shipped with OS X, and what is there is all userland stuff that really doesn't need to be on a phone. The vast majority of the stuff that Apple/NeXT didn't write is licensed under BSD-like terms, and therefore allows them to do whatever they want with it.
Even if there isn't an ARM version of the kernel, and who's to say there isn't. Apple do not have to follow their own licence. That doesn't preclude the rest of the operating system being standard OS-X libraries compiled for ARM. The video iPod is also ARM and some time ago Apple were advertising for a quicktime expert with ARM experience which suggests that at least quicktime has been ported to ARM. If you can have Linux on an AMD-64 and an ARM 7 why not OS-X?
BSD does not require that modified source code be released. AFAIK, there is no GNU software in the mainline distribution of OS X. The only significant piece of GNU software that I'm aware of is the optional GCC compiler. Since Apple is unlikely to ship GCC on their iPhone, they're almost certainly free and clear.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Exactly. Apple has shown in the past that they are capable of recompiling their OS for different architectures -- they did it from PPC and x86 -- why wouldn't they just have recompiled a stripped-down kernel for ARM? After all, they have all the source code, so if anyone could do it, it would be them.
This article just doesn't make any sense. I don't know if the Slashdot editors were looking for an anti-Apple article so as to appear to be giving "equal time," but this is pretty idiotic. There are better criticisms of Apple in general, and of the iPhone in particular, than this.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Any chance we could, like, wait for the iPhone to be, you know, actually released before we make definitive statements on what OS it is or isn't running? Right now, the only people who have any idea what OS is really running on the iPhone are the people who worked on it; I'm taking a wild guess here that you're not one of them.
Sure, I understand it's going to be a long six months with nothing but speculation to keep us warm at night. But let's keep in mind that, until we get our hands on the iPhone, it's speculation only, not knowledge.
How does it mean it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense? I'd say having Cocoa/AppKit (and therefore an Objective-C runtime), Core Animation, and other OS X technologies constitutes being OS X.
Again, what is with this "meaningful" crap? Objective-C, Cocoa, AppKit, and the like are OS X. OS X is the NextStep-derived stuff running on top of Darwin. It can most certainly be OS X without Darwin. In fact, it might be Apple's first steps toward moving off of Mach sometime in the future.
Just because it's not running Darwin does not mean that it's not based off of some of the similar if not directly linked technologies that OS X is built off of. Apple could've created their own proprietary "Darwin" for iPhone if they wanted, much how Linux was a clone of proprietary "Unix". Seeing as it's built for a small and limited device, you wouldn't have to clone all of the OS.
When Jobs refers to OS X, I assume he is talking about the system that they built on top of Darwin. To me, Darwin will be just that; Darwin. It's a BSD. There have been many interviews where Jobs has said that OS X was built on top of Darwin or Unix, so the only logical avenue of thought is that he's not stating that Darwin and the OS X are one in the same (since you CAN run a system off of Darwin alone without OS X), yet recognizes that they hold a symbiotic relationship in Apple's application of merging the two together.
The following is taken verbatim from the NY Times interview article
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
So he's saying that Apple and possibly others might write software for the iPhone. From what Jobs said
you can see that the emphasis will be on control to ensure that all Apps are very robust so that the phone
works reliably.
Wow, there's nothing in your post that proves it's not OS X. A new interface and the fact Apple isn't letting third-parties run on it magically means it's not OS X? Just because you believe it doesn't have the resources to run an embedded version of OS X? And when did Steve Jobs ever say they needed Google's "help" to implement the maps feature? They simply worked with them, which is a market-speak way of saying they partnered up in the search features of the iPhone.
It's OS X. Deal with it, people.
"Sufferin' succotash."
A lot of people are claiming to know what an iPhone really is like inspite of not having seen one or even known of their existence before a couple of days ago.
It may be a striped version of OSX but it obviously is a version of OSX since it has some very OSX features like Core Animation which doesn't even show until Leopard. Even things like Widgets are OSX. They've been working on the phone for years so I'd assume they adapted the OS to the chip they are using. Using even a notebook processor would be silly. The power requirements would limit you to one five minute phone call per charge.
What really seems to be pissing everyone off is it's a computer under the hood and Apple isn't open sourcing it. Apple has always been big on protecting their hardware and I'm guessing that's why they aren't providing the code. It's meant to be a phone at this stage and they don't want to deal with all the hassles of people screwing up their phones trying to get Pong to run on it. Also that has to be the crown jewel for virus writers so why help them? I'm sure they'll open it up to development eventually but it's likely to be years and only when it starts crossing the line into becoming a full on portable computer. It's a staggering smart phone, deal with it.
the first release of NEXSTEP ran on 68030 workstations with just 8MB total RAM, I don't see the problem in running OSX on ARM pda with >32 MB system RAM.
Windows 3.1 ran in 4MB back then, so I guess I can run Vista in 16MB.
This should at least be marked as an editorial, and an extraordinarily poorly written one at that. Something so inflamatory and infantile shouldn't have made it to the front page in the first place.
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
1. Here are the iPhone components according to FRB Research via arstechnica:
- Samsung Electronics for the CPU/Video processing
- Marvell for the 802.11 chipset
- Infineon Technologies for baseband communications
- Broadcomm Corp. for the touch screen controllers
- Cambridge Silicon Radio for the Bluetooth chipset
2. Darwin is an open source core based on FreeBSD according to Apple, Inc..
3. Here is freebsd on ARM processors (intel-based). ARM FreeBSD.
4. Why is it tough to believe that Apple would simply recompile necessary components of Darwin on the ARM processors and then include and compile the necessary (and only the necessary!) mid level libraries? Many existing apps would work with only minor modifications (to take into account the new control scheme) and a recompile.
I'm not sure why you bothered to reply to this article; it's so utterly wrong in so many ways. First of all, Apple holds the copyright to Darwin and can use it however they want. Just because they license it to YOU under a license that requires YOU to share code you modify, Apple is not bound by that license. Secondly, it would be silly for Apple NOT to leverage some of the Mac OS, but it would be just as silly for them to port the entire desktop OS. I think of this as about the same as saying the XBox OS is Windows 2000. It shares many APIs, it's branched from the same codebase, but it's targeted and maintained for a completely different goal.
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