I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this... &A#JD1Tg!d8!' 1583
Me too.
Actually, this situation has been known for a few months now.
The MacWorld-InfoWorld article is a bit confusing, but the overall result is disappointing to the Mac community, to say the least.
Confusion:
Again Mike proves that he is a dolt when it comes to Macs. If he bothered to do any study of Mac versus PC hardware...
1) The article breastle is 'Apple closes down OS X'. Calling Darwin 'OS X' is incorrect. Darwin is Darwin, is open source. Darwin includes what is still called the 'Mach kernel' but is often referred to as the 'Darwin kernel'. Later in the article they do get it right:
OS X is a conglomeration of several of technologies. A lot of them are open source, and will remain open source. What 'closes' with this move is Apple's contribution to the Darwin for x86 open source project. Presumably this means that Apple's last release of Darwin for x86 will be v8.0.1.
2) One might get the impression from the article that: A) There is no Darwin for x86, which is false. B) Or, development of Darwin for x86 is dead, which is also false.
As a mere bystander I have to wonder how Apple can legally make this move. The Mach kernel is by definition open source. You can't change that fact. If Apple are going to go on a proprietary path then of course what they are doing is making their own code elaborations upon the public Mach kernel, but not sharing them. Every open source agreement I have ever read makes it clear that all elaborations up on the applicable open source code MUST be made public as a contribution to the project.
But I am no lawyer, I have not read the specific open source agreement, nor am I am open source developer. My barking here may be entirely up a fruitless tree. I know good old Lefty will take this as an opportunity to bite me. But I think this could be a real concern. Apple may be violating the law. We'll see.
Here is an interesting note from the folks at the Gnu-Darwin project regarding this problem:
Mike wrote Which might explain why they are still the cellar dwellers in terms of market share. Most companies "care about" every...
BTW: It was shortly after Apple made the decision to make their x86 version of the Mach-Darwin kernel proprietary that Avadis Trevanian, a co-developer of Mach, decided to leave the company. Coincidence?
-- Fortune Magazine, 11-29-05: What's your computer setup today? Frederick Brooks: I happily use a Macintosh. It's not been equalled for ease of use, and I want my computer to be a tool, not a challenge. Frederick Brooks is the author of 'The Mythical Man Month'. He spearheaded the movement to modernize computer software engineering in 1975