Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 05:33:25AM -0500, Joshua Isom wrote:
> I keep getting the impression that Apple doesn't release a darwin iso 
> for any real purpose to be used.  So few computers are able to run the 
> latest release that it seems unlikely to be released for bug finding.  
> It's not exactly practical to build it.  Apple seems to hold a lot of 
> things back that are almost necessary.

Apple is a commercial, publically held corporation.  Their product
they are selling is Mac OS X.  Darwin is not, and in all probability 
will never be competition for Mac OS X.
However, it is freely available and at least partially open.  As
Apple provides Darwin, it is not very useful.  However, that is not
to say Darwin is useless.  Apple has not given it a use.  This gives
us the opportunity to create a use for it.  Several people here are
working to give Darwin a purpose.  The first step is making it so you
don't have to be Superman to build Darwin.  Significant progress 
has been made in this direction.  From that point, actual development
can begin, and it can become useful for whatever purpose we want.
It can be useful as a proving grounds for new technology.  For instance,
a packaging system could be developed and fleshed out in the open on
Darwin, and Darwin could be used to prove the usefulness of this 
packaging system on OS X.  Mac OS X's development system is very closed.
For those that care about and want to contribute and improve Mac OS X,
Darwin can be an opportunity to open that development process.
It is one thing for an engineer to recieve a patch in a vacuum, it
is quite another to see it working and how people are using it.
We could also take darwin in a direction of attempting to be a useful 
desktop system, by bundling X and one of the many window managers/desktop 
pieces of software.

Darwin's uselessness and lack of direction can be viewed as an
opportunity to create these things.  For once you don't have a 
corporation or a benevolent dictator creating pressure on how
the software they are giving you is to be used.

Rob