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Usenix: Darwin Welcomed by BSD Community
An anonymous submission tells us that
MacCentral has a story about the start of the annual Usenix conference, where Apple's Darwin Open Source OS reportedly received a warm welcome as a new member of the BSD operating system family.
It would be nice to have an alternative like MacOS X for the Wintel machines. However, it is not likely for reasons like the following:
1) Apple makes money from making boxes, not software: The bulk of Apple's earnings come from the boxes it sells. Making their OS available to Wintel machines would cut into those revenues.
2) MacOS X on Wintel makes Apple compete with MS directly: Ok, they are already competitors in a way, but this will bring that competition to a different level. The Mac relies on MS Office suit to make their platform more attractive by making documents from Mac Office compatible with documents from Windose Office. They cannot afford to lose MS as a developer of their platform. At least now.
3) Maintaining two flavors of the OS is costly: Their R&D budget will pretty much double in order to maintain and develop an Intel version of their OS.
This been said, there are "rumors" that Apple is secretly continuing development of an Intel version of MacOS X Server. This is very likely since until last year there were builds of the OS made for Intel and PPC as well.
The Intel version was quietly discontinued after MS announced their support of the Mac at the famous Macworld keynote that year. I would not be surprised if MS had something to do with halting OS X Server development on Intel since it competes directly with NT Server.
Comments to this posting are welcome...
Cocoa was supposed to be cross-platform. Way back when we were supposed to have Yellow Box for Mac OS 9 about now, and Apple would probably be preparing Rhapsody 1.5 and announcing CyberDog 5, Apple promised OpenStep developers that, if we wrote for Yellow Box (now Cocoa), then we would be able to deploy (and I quote) "on Rhapsody for Macintosh, Intel, and Yellow Box for Windows."
...
Apple has been, shall we say, dismal in carrying out that promise. They proceded to scrap Rhapsody for Intel, then Yellow Box for Mac OS 8.5 in favor of Carbon, then Yellow Box for Windows. So, now, Yellow Box developers have nothing to write for except Mac OS X Server. I wouldn't exactly call that cross-platform.
How has Apple violated its promises? Let me count that ways: OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Yellow Box for Windows, Rhapsody, Display PostScript, QuickDraw 3D, eWorld, six-slot G3s, Pippin, Copland, Gershwin,
You'll pardon me if I tell you that my team is now working on Linux.
>so maybe it'll be good for the existing BSDs too.
If you look at older coverage, you'll find that apple sent gaggles of bug fixes to the netbsd base they borrowed from.
Search the FreeBSD site for "Wilfredo Sanchez". He is the BSD (and now Darwin) leader at Apple. You'll find his (i.e. Apple's) contributions.
You seem to be misunderstanding RISC. There is not necessarily anything inherently superior about it. If it were all machines would only have a few instructions. There is a balance to be reached between how much work the CPU, compiler, and programmer does. RISC is about making the compiler (assembler) do more work. In fact MMX and Altivec are a tendency back to CISC type architectures. More complex instructions. Otherwise they would just give you multiply and add instead of dotproduct.
Remember RISC executes more instructions to do any operation. Since there is a smaller granularity though, effective pipelining and out-of-order execution allows greater throughput.
Hopefully that made some sense.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away Steve Jobs actually did this.
It was a consistent, well designed, object oriented UI on top of a Mach microkernel with a BSD subsystem. It also came with one of the best development environments ever, and was a testament to superior design. It had cd quality sound, publishing quality graphics, built in networking, even pre-emptive multitasking. All of this in the days of MS windows 3.0. NeXT's hardware was even easy to use. One screw undoes the case, almost no internal wires, the case is cast magnesium and acts as it's own heat sink. They just dont make 'em like this anymore.
It's interesting to note that MS put them out of business by the way of compaq and dell selling ultra-cheap crapfests, and vendors being lured away by economies of scale.
It's unfortunate that Mac community has forced Apple to water down the superior technology they bought from NeXT with Mac compatibility layers instead of an incremental update of the great OS they had. NeXT really only required incremental upgrades to bring it into 2000, but Apple has spent most of it's time trying to keep Mac developers happy rather than updating the OS they bought from NeXT.
-Rich
Wow. And here I was thinking all along that the Open Source community was more interested in what kind of code you give back to the community, not how much money you donate. If we're talking about code, man-hours, etc. I think Apple's given us quite a lot, with even more to come. If we're talking money, then let's give Intel and IBM the applause they deserve for sinking all that dough into Red Hat.
Vulcan wrote:
The story doesn't mention it. However, about half the userland code is from NetBSD, and Apple have supplied improvements and changes which have been integrated back into NetBSD. If OpenBSD track the NetBSD userland then those changes are probably in OpenBSD as well.
Apple are planning (or already have) used code from the FreeBSD kernel in the mach kernel. I assume this is to get ideas and possible implementations, rather than simple cut-n-paste. As Apple's engineers refine those ideas and implementations (where refinement is possible, obviously, FreeBSD already has a very good kernel) those refinements will be fed back to FreeBSD (from which the other BSDs can grab them). Again, this probably won't be a simple cut-n-paste job, but more a "We were able to get x% speed up here by doing x, y, and z. Here's diffs, so you can reimplement it in your code".
N
BeOS may not use unix code, but it is mostly posix compliant and Be is shooting for full compliance in r5. While Mac's may have MacOS X as their next generation consumer OS (the client), the PC platform has BeOS which has all the basic features of good unices like smp, pre-emptive multitasking, protected memory, gnu tools (almost if not all of them). Right now on a technological scale Windows can only compete with BeOS in 3d acceleration because BeOS doesn't support it yet. However VERY soon when r4.5 comes out there will be 3d acceleration for those of us who took the plunge to install the flying batmobile (BeOS).
---Got Coffee?---
AU/X was System V, and there was *no* GNU stuff available, as far as I could tell, apparently due to a FSF boycott.
AU/X was pretty cool for it's day though. I believe the OSX "Blue Box" works essentially the same way that Mac programs (including the Finder) ran on AU/X.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Because it is Apple, it's a commercial OS. They are also opening things like AppleTalk, NetInfo, their DriverKit (IOKit), filesystem (HFS,HFS+) and a few other things that have never seen the light of day.
;).
This was really done in response to the outcry that there wasn't an x86 port of MacOS X (All the developer releases, Rhapsody, had a fully functional x86 version). So by releasing Darwin they released all the x86 code that was already there so that we can port it over. Darwin is a *very* portable system so eventually we should see it on Sparc and Alpha too.
Then Apple can sell the MacOS X GUI on top... and there will be a REAL MS killer
x86 sux...I'd rather not perpetuate the intellectual monopoly x86 has. It's cheap, but that's -all- it has going for it.
ARM is cheap, fast, and easy on power consumption. Alpha is the fastest slab of silicon money can buy. You can buy generic system boards for -both- architectures. We already have a low-end workstation/PC platform for MacOS X: the Macintosh.
Darth Binks
Meesa gonna bring you to da darkside, yah!