| Is Apple serious about open source? |
Aug. 08, 2006
When Apple announced that it was moving Mac OS X to the Intel platform, one thing that didn't get much attention was that Apple would not be open-sourcing the Intel Darwin kernel. Now, Apple has reversed its course and has quietly announced that it will open-source the kernel after all.
In a note to the Darwin developer's list, Apple's open-source project manager, Ernest Prabhakar, wrote, "As of today [August 7th], we are posting buildable kernel sources for Intel-based Macs alongside the usual PowerPC (and other Intel) sources, starting with Mac OS X 10.4.7."
In addition, Apple is launching a new open-source Darwin developers' site, Mac OS Forge. This site currently hosts five open-source projects: the Darwin kernel; Bonjour, a no-configuration needed network technology; the Darwin Calendar Server; launchd, a system service management framework; and WebKit, a KDE-based Web browser engine.
These new moves come, however, only after many open-source developers have grown disgusted with Apple's open-source attitude.
In June, for example, Apple officials told Tom Yeager, a columnist who follows Darwin, that only a "fraction of a fraction" of Mac users were interested in working with or recompiling Darwin source code. In late July, the OpenDarwin project, a group devoted to advancing Darwin, closed its doors in part because the open-source development group had been unable to work successfully with Apple.
Earlier, Rob Braun, an OpenDarwin founder and core team member, explained some of the group's problems with Apple in an essay in Daemon News. Braun wrote, "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."
If Apple's sudden re-embrace of open-source developers for Mac OS X turns out to be a merely cosmetic move to mollify the free software community, the community is likely to once more turn its back on Apple's open-source offering.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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