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OpenDarwin Project Shutting Down
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Jul 25, 2006 10:35 PM
from the hard-to-hit-a-moving-target dept.
from the hard-to-hit-a-moving-target dept.
niabok writes "According to a message sent by Rob Braun to the OpenDarwin mailing lists, the OpenDarwin project will be shutting down, saying that 'OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and
moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.' The project's servers will remain online long enough to allow developers to move their various projects elsewhere."
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Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Funny)
At least there'll be some profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:At least there'll be some profit (Score:3, Funny)
It's take more than a good pagerank to make a name valuable. The name itself has to mean something. There are porn folks who'll buy a popular name just to grab they extra hits, but they're not going to pay very much for it.
Then I guess they should've named their project "Open Darwina". Oh yeah, open wide for me baby...
Quite Frankly.... (Score:4, Funny)
Stay tuned!
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, the design phase of the ID project was done eons ago, literally, and before any implementation work was begun. It was never open. I think the requirements document must have been lost long ago though, because nobody knows wtf any of this stuff is. but EVERYONE knows that for a project this vast and complex, the only way to do it is to plan everything in advance from structures
Re:Quite Frankly.... (Score:3, Funny)
adj.
1. Taking the time to get it right.
KFG
Sad (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sad (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunatley, it does seem to be hosted on the OpenDarwin servers, so I wonder what the long term plans are for the maintainers of the project. I hope it can continue to exist, as I for one would miss the nice ports st
Re:Sad (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenDarwin was just a host for DarwinPorts. They will just find another host. The interest in DarwinPorts is high enough so that you don't have to worry about them disappearing.
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I agree that Apple isn't giving back enough to open source, but they have no hesitation using and shipping GPL'ed stuff. Two important examples are gcc and bash. And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.
Re:Sad (Score:5, Informative)
This is the kind of nit-picking I hate on Slashdot. He didn't say "while avoiding giving anything back to the gcc project", he said "while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project". He qualified the word "anything", and you've responded as if he didn't.
Objective C was close to useless for the longest time in GCC, which adopted Apple's changes largely, I think, in the hope someone would make it a viable system in the future. A crude object framework consisting of just the Object class was added (note: not NSObject) and a small run-time, by independent (non-Apple) developers, but until GNUstep came along there was nothing you could really do with all of that unless you spent a few months developing a basic class library. Basic meaning pretty much "everything". No string classes, IO classes, or anything else, existed unless you chose to write it.
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.htm
NeXt didn't want to contribute their code back to the Free Software movement. They even had some sneaky attempts (shipping just the
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's get real for a moment. Linux has become popular on servers for the same reason Java did, i.e. it generated a lot of press buzz, and has companies like IBM and HP pushing it to their customers (which they call "partners" to make things look cosy and pally). This means that the majority of corporate Linux setups (and by corporate, I mean any corporation, big or small) were chosen by people who don't know or care what the GPL is, have never heard of Stallman or the FSF, think a Gnu is a type of ungulate that lives in Africa, and would be happily using one of the BSDs if that was what their big "we take care of everything" hand-holding "partner" was telling them to use instead. Geeks within such companies have zero real-world input into any money based decision-making process, and use what they're told to use, hence the fact that Microsoft can sell them Windows and MS-Office for their their desktops, server-side Windows with Exchange for departmental services, Visual Studio for development, while Linux with Apache etc. live on their web server farms. If these people gave a fart about things like the GPL or what their pet geeks think is great, they wouldn't let anything from MS within a mile of their corporate buildings, and would be using open source tools to build their Linux-hosted webs instead of costly proprietary stuff like WebSphere and Tivoli, which are just incidentally supplied by those same "partners" who recommend, install, and support Linux.
The GPL is therefore no more relevant to Linux's success than a lack of it has been to the immeasurably greater success of Microsoft's products. It is popular on servers because it works, is free as in beer, leverages existing corporate UNIX expertise, and a lot of business people have heard of it thanks to their everything-including-the-kitchen-sink IT service "partners", whereas few have heard of the various BSD variants. By the same token, it is a flop on the desktop because, for far too many non-geeks without access to a geek, it doesn't work properly with the hardware they have, fails to leverage their (albeit minimal) expertise with other operating systems and software, and most consumers either haven't heard of it, or know the name but are extremely hazy about what it is.
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
So why was nobody interested in Open Darwin? Because it's Apple's product. There is no sense of community ownership, or community involvement, working on Open Darwin amounts do doing free R&D for Apple. Moreover, Apple won't even release the really interesting parts of OS X, and can, at any time (as they've demonstrated with the x86 release), withhold code if it is convenient for them to do so.
It's naive to believe that GPL vs BSD has nothing to do with the failure of Open Darwin. If the BSD code had been GPL'ed, Open Darwin could be a true community project. Apple wouldn't be able to withhold code at any time, it would have to release interesting kernel drivers, and they couldn't take peoples' changes and close them back up later. Of course, that is not to say that just GPL by itself would've compensated for the complete lack of tact with which Apple approaches its open source projects, or that this occurrance is necessarily the fate of all BSD licensed projects, but rather that this event is a textbook demonstration of one of the shortcomings of the BSD license.
Parent
Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
Fink is not out of Date! (Score:4, Informative)
You should now find you have more than 5000 packaes instead of 1800 to choose from and the latest version oof PERL, Ruby, KDE etc. are all there. You will have to update all your old packages to use them though, with Fink you can either choose stable or unstable, not a mixture. Having said that I have over 1000 unstable Fink packages installed on this mac aand they work fine.
Happy finking.
Parent
Sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, they ported fink and some libs to Darwin, but that's pretty much it. ODP has been dorman for years, since 2002, pretty much.
Is Apple to blame for their luck of support? I do not think so; since they do have a neat thing going with http://developer.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]
Re:Sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
They really missed the point. Darwin was never intended to be yet another open-source UNIX derivative like Linux or the BSDs. Its whole purpose was to make life a bit easier for people writing drivers for Mac OS X, so when they started beating their chests about how Apple was oppressing them, those of us in the Mac community bascially said: "Umm, who the fuck are you anyway, and why aren't you just using Mac OS X or Linux like a normal person would?"
-jcr
Parent
Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:3, Informative)
An example of open-source compatible OS would be OpenVMS in my mind, which is, of course, closed-source, but very p
You're mistaken, Apple does release tons of code (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm... You're mistaken [apple.com]. Some of Apple's open-sourced code:
And of course, there's more, in addition to all the other existing open source components which they use and contribute to.
There's even more which they don't release, and you can like that or not (it's a business decision to them), but you can't claim that they don't release code.
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Re:.... Apple is NOT open-source, by any means. (Score:4, Informative)
* The CLR part of
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Sad but not unexpected (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:3, Insightful)
Are they in violation of any software license? No? Then Apple has absolutely no obligation to give anything to anybody. If "the community" wants more than "precious little," they should put that in the license terms, eh?
That's like getting a plumber bill for $150, paying $150, then having the plumber come and complain that you didn't give him a massage, too.
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:5, Informative)
Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?
I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.
Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.
Parent
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:BSD's fault. (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you aware that Konqueror is GPL? And that KHTML is LGPL?
Maybe Apple chose FreeBSD for other reasons than the BSD license? I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix us
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.
Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.
Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.
Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.
Parent
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh wuh? OpenDarwin was frozen out of the information and code required to remain relevant, but what you hear are people blaming BSD for Linux's problems? I don't see anyone talking about problems with linux here, after all linux is thriving and opendarwin is, well, deceased. Doesn't sound like a shortcoming to me.
Re:BSD's fault. (Score:4, Insightful)
GGP said:
This does sound to me like someone blaming BSD for Linux's (perceived) problems, and I agree with GP that it's a pretty sad assertion. I don't agree it's an attitude that can be generally attributed to 'extreme [GNU/]Linux zealots' - most I know would consider any negative opinion of the Linux desktop to be heresy, and any hypothetical Apple assistance would be derided as an undesirable dumbening of self-evident UI perfection.
Parent
I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
Bruce
Parent
Don't fret. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Don't fret. (Score:3, Interesting)
DP's "it just works" capabilities means I get more work done.
One more aspect of evolution: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Linux (zealots) have been pissing me off (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Linux user of four years who has recently bought their first, personal, mac laptop I wish to call bullshit. I'd like to point out that OSX still plays a very important part in Linux development (less so in BSD) - specifically in regards to new features. Take for example xgl/compiz and xcompmgr which will be in full deployment for when Vista ships to compete with the M$ eye candy...Sure it only came into the lime light when Vistas beta'
Re:Apple has been pissing me off (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. Try looking at the bsd subdirectory of the xnu source tree; it's not "just BSD" - it implements processes/threads atop Mach tasks/threads, and has IOKit for drivers - but it's recognizably based on BSD kernel code."
It still uses BSD code for that.
Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme (Score:3, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder why this isn't an ongoing project like Wine.
Well, basically, it's like this: the people who know enough to work on it are, for the most part just using Mac OS X, and most of the Linux crowd can't really tell the difference between GNUStep and Gnome (ie, they actually believe Gnome is good enough).
The upshot is that the contributors to GNUStep are a very small number indeed, and it's amazing how far they've gotten with so few people working on it.
-jcr
Re:Sometimes I wish I weren't such a sux programme (Score:5, Insightful)
This is precisely why GNUStep gets no traction: the Linux crowd actually believes that a cross-platform abortion like Qt is acceptable. Of course, this isn't surprising for a community that still hasn't admitted to itself what an abomination X11 is.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Apple Rapidly Losing Its Cool (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What a surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
That wasn't the point at all. The point is that Apple has been saying what great OSS supporters they are, and now they are even discontinuing the tiny bit of code sharing they have done.
There's nothing illegal or really wrong here... just more of Apple's slimy marketing tactics.
But hey, who can argue with the company who came out with the first 64-bit computer?!
Re:What a surprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they are not. Apple's code sharing has always happened via its own website [apple.com]. OpenDarwin was not run by Apple, although several Apple engineers supported and actively participated in its various projects.
That doesn't mean that it's sad that Apple has not been able to create a satisfactory policy which allowed external developers work directly on Darwin and contribute to it. It's not like they can't do it in general, as in case of the WebKit project some external developers even got direct commit access (which is more than what the OpenDarwin people wanted, afaik they just wanted their fixes to be incorporated by Apple).
I guess in case of XNU, things conflict(ed) too much with Apple's product secrecy policy...
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