Intel OS X kernel no longer open

[n0cmonkey]

link

We've been waiting for it to happen, and now it has. Between Apple's craptastic license, the KHTML issues, being one of many to not support OpenSSH, and now this is Apple doing anything decent for the open source community?

 

[Nothinman]

I haven't been watching too closely, but Apple has always seemed like they wanted the benefits of OSS without having to contribute. I'm not sure what they expect to gain by doing this, it's not like closed source has helped MS fight piracy so why does Apple think it'll work for them?

 

[stash]

I have no idea if it will reduce piracy for Apple, but Microsoft (so far) has not leveraged TPM chips like Apple is apparently planning on doing.

 

[Nothinman]

True, TPM will make things more difficult.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: stash
I have no idea if it will reduce piracy for Apple, but Microsoft (so far) has not leveraged TPM chips like Apple is apparently planning on doing.

If tying the OS to the hardware is all Apple uses it for I don't see a problem with it. I'll also be very very surprised. 😛

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: stash
I have no idea if it will reduce piracy for Apple, but Microsoft (so far) has not leveraged TPM chips like Apple is apparently planning on doing.

If tying the OS to the hardware is all Apple uses it for I don't see a problem with it. I'll also be very very surprised. 😛

Ya. Obviously.

The thing about TPM is with versions of x86 chips that support easy (relatively) abstraction you need it to be able to detect things like hypervisor-level rootkits (or rootkits inserted UNDER the kernel). Technically it's feasible to make it so that the rootkit would remain after you wipe and reinstall the operating system.

Also there are other nice uses for it.

I mean, in other words, everybody supports TPM. Linux supports it, Windows, supports it, Apple supports it.

But on the other hand more then likely the principal goal of Apple and Windows to support it is so that they can turn PCs into more of a consumer appliance rather then a computing platform by restricting what people can and cannot do on their own computer. At least Microsoft can point at businesses and tell them that they can use related stuff to protect internal documents and such, but I think that's stretching it a bit since that's already easily possible without it. Apple doesn't have that.

Personally all of this, and Apple championing DRM, and them fighting against free speech by suing bloggers (their own fanboys) over 'leaked' information... as well as other things. I just don't care about Apple anymore. Just another propriatory software company trying to push propriatory software on a propriatory platform, which is their right if they feel like it. But I just don't care anymore.

 

[ProviaFan]

As the otherwise satisfied owner of a Powerbook G4, this is very discouraging. I still like OS X, but this definitely puts a damper on my desire to replace my Windows/AMD desktop someday with some kind of Powermac/x86.

 

[imported_Questar]

Wow, how rumors fly!

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Second, Apple has not said it is pulling Darwin. What's available for download is older than what's in CVS. That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

I'm not sating they haven't closed Darwin and drivers, I'm saying we don't know that they have.

And really, who cares? How many Mac users have modified their kernel?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Questar
Wow, how rumors fly!

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Second, Apple has not said it is pulling Darwin. What's available for download is older than what's in CVS. That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

I'm not sating they haven't closed Darwin and drivers, I'm saying we don't know that they have.

And really, who cares? How many Mac users have modified their kernel?

You're right, we don't know. The source is "in flux." But seeing as how Apple's been reluctant to give back to the community (by reluctant I mean they take steps to avoid giving back) it makes a lot of sense to me.

I've seen at least one kernel modification out there that I would have used had I been using that version of Mac OS X.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: Questar
Wow, how rumors fly!

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Second, Apple has not said it is pulling Darwin. What's available for download is older than what's in CVS. That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

I'm not sating they haven't closed Darwin and drivers, I'm saying we don't know that they have.

And really, who cares? How many Mac users have modified their kernel?

We don't know for sure, of course, but if this is true, the news is not good. Your points, while valid from a practical point of view, do not change the fact that some people consider this a matter of principle being violated. It's kind of like your right to privacy, which some want to take away for similar reasons - if you're not doing anything bad, then why does privacy matter?

 

[drag]

Well people sometimes figure that OS X is a nice propriatory shell wrapped around a BSD operating system with a microkernel.

And to think that Darwin hasn't been valuable to developers and end users is completely untrue. First off it helped Apple a hell of a lot themselves. Apple simply would not have a decent operating system nowadays if it wasn't for the ton of Free/Open source software that they've sucked into their code base. Darwin helped out a lot with this and accelerated the proccess by getting open source developers involved. Having the Darwin source probably also helped out tremendiously people porting applications to OS X from other Unix-like systems as well as writing and testing drivers for OS X. I've read that in regards to Linux driver development that people that have worked writing drivers for both Windows and Linux find Linux much easier and this is in a large part due to the open source nature.

And beleive or not people actually USE darwin. http://www.opendarwin.org/

If it is true, and I don't think that it's unlikely that it is, all apple is doing is shooting themselves in the foot. Seeing their recent anti-free speech lawsuites and past Apple history that is something that they are pretty good at.

 

[doornail]

Originally posted by: ProviaFan
It's kind of like your right to privacy, which some want to take away for similar reasons - if you're not doing anything bad, then why does privacy matter?

Because the people watching you might have very different notions of what is "bad".

 

[Nothinman]

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Audit it? Fix something and contribute it back to Darwin and Apple?

You could ask the same thing about anything that's OSS, but there are a lot of people who can do something worthwhile with the source.

That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

Which is just a reiteration of how bad Apple interacts with the OSS community.

 

[imported_Questar]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Audit it? Fix something and contribute it back to Darwin and Apple?

You could ask the same thing about anything that's OSS, but there are a lot of people who can do something worthwhile with the source.

That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

Which is just a reiteration of how bad Apple interacts with the OSS community.

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: Questar

Originally posted by: Nothinman

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Audit it? Fix something and contribute it back to Darwin and Apple?

You could ask the same thing about anything that's OSS, but there are a lot of people who can do something worthwhile with the source.

That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

Which is just a reiteration of how bad Apple interacts with the OSS community.

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

Wtf? Linux doesn't have any more of an os around it than darwin 😕

 

[bersl2]

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Questar

Originally posted by: Nothinman

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Audit it? Fix something and contribute it back to Darwin and Apple?

You could ask the same thing about anything that's OSS, but there are a lot of people who can do something worthwhile with the source.

That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

Which is just a reiteration of how bad Apple interacts with the OSS community.

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

Wtf? Linux doesn't have any more of an os around it than darwin 😕

Actually, Darwin is the name for the kernel + userspace. The kernel's name is XNU.

 

[drag]

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

It's not a Microkernel. It has parts that are BASED on a Microkernel and it does some microkernel-like things..... but it is definately a monolithic kernel. People like to call it 'hybrid' because it has microkernel-like aspects. It has a large amount of BSD code inside of it.. Stuff like TCP/IP stack and file system stuff is built into OS X's kernel. Very microkernel-unlike.

Microsoft did the same thing with their kernel years and years ahead of Apple. The 3.1 NT stuff did use a sort of microkernel, but they quickly abandoned it. Now the NT (as used in Windows XP) is sorta-microkernel-like. Hybrid kernel similar to OS X's.

So if OS X uses a microkernel, then so does Windows XP.

Plus don't mistake 'microkernel' with 'simple kernel'. Microkernels and their servers are usually end up being much more complex then monolithic kernel.

 

[imported_Questar]

Originally posted by: bersl2

Originally posted by: kamper

Originally posted by: Questar

Originally posted by: Nothinman

First, why would you want to run Darwin? What could you possibly do with the source?

Audit it? Fix something and contribute it back to Darwin and Apple?

You could ask the same thing about anything that's OSS, but there are a lot of people who can do something worthwhile with the source.

That pretty normal for Apple, they sometimes take a good long time to update what's available.

Which is just a reiteration of how bad Apple interacts with the OSS community.

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

Wtf? Linux doesn't have any more of an os around it than darwin 😕

Actually, Darwin is the name for the kernel + userspace. The kernel's name is XNU.

You are absolutly correct. And it's only XNU and the drivers that have been removed. This means one thing - you can't compile a bootable OS. The rest of Darwin - the stuff that developers work on - is still available.

 

[imported_Questar]

From Ron Braun, former Apple employee, and core member of the OpenDarwin team:

"I would like to be perfectly clear on something Darwin has been dead for years. It has lived on in a zombie state and bits have been falling off the rotting corpse. It's only now that people are starting to notice the stench."

"It was difficult for people outside Apple to understand the conventions they used and the internal processes they needed to follow. For example, it was difficult to follow what versions of which projects went into which release and what constituted a consistent system. Building the source was also very difficult as the internal Apple build system, XBS, is very large, very involved, and was not documented outside Apple. For building Darwin standalone releases, XBS could not be used because it was proprietary and because it was just much too large and complex for an average person to use. Not all of us have a team of people and a farm of machines dedicated to just building our software."

"During the transition to snapshot source releases, another transition was happening: a transition away from Darwin source to Mac OS X source. This is a subtle but important difference. Darwin source could be reasonably expected to be consistent and be used to create a Darwin standalone open source release. Mac OS X source was the source used to build Mac OS X, which could include dependencies on non-open source projects That made it difficult to impossible to build a Darwin release or even to build these projects on a stock Mac OS X system."

Darwin is old, out of date, and useless. It is not OS X.

 

[drag]

Yep. Apple sucks at open source. (try putting a link to were you posted quotes from, it's polite I figure)

Some more nice quotes from him. http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html
from a Daemonnews article titled "A Brief History of Apple's Open Source Efforts".

In conclusion:

Even now, we are going through yet another cycle of losing access that we once had. With the release of Mac OS X for x86 processors, Apple has chosen to not release source to key components of the OS, such as the kernel and all drivers. This means Darwin/x86 is dead in the water; Darwin/ppc has many closed source components and is a deprecated architecture. One has to wonder why Apple even bothers to release non-GPL'd source at all, if it is unwilling to cooperate with external developers to increase their return on investment and accept external bug fixes and features. Even worse, one has to wonder why people would want to donate their time to such a fruitless and pointless cause.

Basicly Apple started off by donating lots and lots of code. Then once OS X was nearing completion they started locking more and more of it away. They made it nearly impossible to get bug fixes back into OS X. They removed source code for lots of drivers and started replacing them with updated binary-only ones. All sorts of stuff like that.

 

[Nothinman]

Audit it? How many people on the face of the earth can do that? It's not Linux, it's a MicroKernel. There's no shell, no commands, no nothing.

There's no shell in the Linux kernel either, the fact that it's a microkernel is irrelevant.

Without an OS to wrap around it, it is almost completely useless.

That's true of any kernel and is orthogonal to the original point.

"It was difficult for people outside Apple to understand the conventions they used and the internal processes they needed to follow. For example, it was difficult to follow what versions of which projects went into which release and what constituted a consistent system. Building the source was also very difficult as the internal Apple build system, XBS, is very large, very involved, and was not documented outside Apple. For building Darwin standalone releases, XBS could not be used because it was proprietary and because it was just much too large and complex for an average person to use. Not all of us have a team of people and a farm of machines dedicated to just building our software."

Just more proof that Apple has learned nothing from their brief foray into OSS.

 

[halfadder]

A brief history is not enough. This goes back to the roots of Mac OS X -- the NeXTstep operating system on which Mac OS X is based. After Apple, but before Pixar, Steve Jobs started NeXT.

The Mach microkernel was developed to aid the development of the 4.2BSD kernel. Several of the grad students that worked on the Mach and BSD projects went on to develop NeXTstep. As per the BSD license, NeXT wasn't required to open their source, nor did they. In fact, they even violated GPL by not releasing their modifications to gcc. (NeXT eventually gave in and released the source).

Apple's moves are nothing new. Many companies, including NeXT and Sun, have used BSD and GPL code over the years as their OSes were based on that code in the first place. Quite often the changes don't get released to the rest of the public, especially when they start to get mixed/tainted with closed source internal projects and when time and deadlines start to get tight. Sometimes the lawyers are the problem. There are a bunch of reasons why this code is often released long after the fact.

I totally disagree with Apple's latest move, it's going to really hurt driver developers and curious hackers. College level computer science OS courses will have to look at the PPC version of the Darwin source if they want to see Apple's latest OS kernel code.

But if you want to see an example where Apple has done GOOD with their open source projects, check out the Quicktime Streaming Server or the WebKit HTML engine. QTSS has always been a good open project. WebKit (a fork of KHTML) caused a lot of complaints, but Apple has since made their CVS public and now has several non-Apple programmers contributing and reviewing source! A good example for other projects within Apple.

 

[Zugzwang152]

Apple exists to make money. I don't see how all these Elite Members are surprised by economics taking the front seat.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: halfadder
. . .
Sun, have used BSD and GPL code over the years as their OSes were based on that code in the first place.

Sun has an excuse, they wrote a lot of the BSD code out there originally. At least Bill Joy did. 😛

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Zugzwang152
Apple exists to make money. I don't see how all these Elite Members are surprised by economics taking the front seat.

Not surprised, just disappointed. This has nothing to do with money what so ever.