Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Sep 13, 2005, at 3:33 AM, 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.

The purpose of releasing Darwin has never been to have it be a  
"product" to be used for some clear set of purposes.   Apple already  
ships a product called Mac OS X with a lot of clear objectives in  
mind, and to compare Darwin to Linux or FreeBSD is somewhat misguided  
since you really ought to be comparing those to Mac OS X.  A Linux  
distribution like "Debian Sarge" or a *BSD distribution like "FreeBSD  
5.3" IS intended to be the end-product of the respective teams who  
produce them and they have a lot of clear mission objectives in mind  
for them, just as Apple does for Mac OS X.  On the other hand, as Rob  
Braun has already pointed out, Darwin is released solely as a  
collection of reference bits for which YOU are welcome to define a  
mission or further package with some end-goal in mind, just as  
projects like OpenDarwin have done (though, admittedly, the end-goal  
of that project has always been a little fuzzy itself, which probably  
needs to change :-).

I regret that some people feel "duped" by this, but I don't think  
that was due to any misdirection on Apple's part so much as  
unrealistic and unfounded assumptions on their part.  Apple has  
always been very clear on Darwin's mission, as you point out below:

> In Apple's developer documentation, they state:
>
> "The Darwin layers of Mac OS X are open source. This serves two  
> main purposes: to provide a resource for other open source  
> development efforts (such as Linux and BSD variants) to make their  
> software available on Mac hardware and to provide source code to  
> aid developers writing device drivers and other low-level  
> technologies for Mac OS X."

Let's all read that again together:  It's a resource for other open  
source development efforts.  It's a source code reference for  
developers to read while they're developing code for Mac OS X.   
Nowhere does it say that Darwin is intended to be a stand-alone OS  
with a windowing system and a nice desktop like KDE or GNOME all  
built in, ready to go and runnable straight off a CDROM.  There are  
plenty of FreeBSD and Linux distributions that already fill that  
niche more than admirably and it would buy Apple precisely nothing to  
go head to head with them with a Darwin distribution.   If some 3rd  
parties wished to do so, I personally think that would be kind of  
neat, but that would be entirely up to those 3rd parties (and, one  
might posit, if it wasn't a challenge of enough interest to even  
motivate a few aggregators to produce such a thing, then it probably  
wouldn't be of that much end-user interest either).

> I first tried to install darwin at an annoying failure, and instead  
> went with FreeBSD.  The main reason I wanted darwin is because I  
> use OS X.  But Apple's commitment to darwin seems mainly to be  
> along the lines of "we want you to buy OS X instead of darwin, so  
> here's a bare operating system we don't guarantee any of you can use."

Apple doesn't sell Darwin, so it's not trying to "sell" you one over  
the other.  Apple is in the business of selling Mac OS X, period.   
Darwin is provided as a public service to its Mac OS X users who  
might like or need to see what's under the hood and as a service to  
the open source community in general who can use the bits for  
reference or for porting to other platforms.  There has already been  
widespread interest in doing so with launchd, bonjour, ASL and Core  
Foundation (to name but a few Darwin technologies) so some traction,  
though admittedly not as much as theoretically possible, has been  
attained there.

Now, if you want to argue about how easy or hard it is to build  
individual darwin components as part of the porting and reference  
process that Apple claims to support, nobody on this list is going to  
stand up and say that it's been a total bowl of cherries and life is  
just perfect there.   Apple has paid and continues to pay engineers  
like Kevin van Vechten to work on systems like darwinbuild which  
makes the process of building stuff considerably easier than it ever  
has been in the past.    Apple produces and sells Mac OS X, that's  
the main product and what pays the bills, but when and where it can  
also invest some time and effort into making Darwin more approachable  
or better able to fulfill its mission, it will.   What users need to  
be clear on is just how specific and finite that mission is and where  
they're ultimately the ones responsible for taking things further if  
they have the will and the desire to do so.  Apple has even gone so  
far as to co-found projects like OpenDarwin, donating hardware and  
engineering resources to bootstrap it, but after that it's up to the  
community to decide where it wants to go and how it wants to get  
there, and that's how it should be.

- Jordan