Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Sep 13, 2005, at 6:46 PM, Markus Hitter wrote:

> here's clearly some erosion going on.
>
> In the Mac OS X 10.0/10.1 days, Darwin was, updated in CVS  
> regularly. One could watch source code being developed in small  
> changes, compile the stuff weekly, etc ...

I think Kevin has already addressed most of these points rather  
well.  Yes, there was "live" CVS access.  Yes, it was also largely  
useless because the bits in there did not generally correspond to  
anything you were running (ToT was generally guaranteed to be a work- 
in-progress) and whatever warm fuzzies some people got from watching  
the engineering machine in action, a lot more people suffered a  
distinct lack of warm fuzzies in tracking down all the tag  
information they'd need to check out a pile of reference bits that  
actually corresponded to a major/minor release of Mac OS X.  As Kevin  
says, what we have today, particularly with DarwinBuild, is a whole  
lot better than those dark days.   It's always easy to look back at  
the past and say that everything was much better, cheaper, more well- 
constructed, etc. and conveniently edit the bad parts out of your  
memory, and I suspect that more than a little of that is occurring  
here.  I was there, and I don't recall ANYONE "compiling stuff  
weekly", I mostly remember them complaining that they couldn't get  
anything to compile at all. :-)

> With 10.4, the do-it-yourself OS is obviously gone. According to  
> your post, one can peek into all those source files, one can try to  
> compile a project or two and one can hope this works on a OS X  
> installation. The possibility to run own modifications on a self- 
> built OS (where you have control over everything, not just the  
> Apple-provided excerpts) is a thing of the past.

Kevin has already explained that this is completely untrue.  There's  
a darwin release in progress as we speak, in fact, all driven by  
opendarwin folks.  If anything, things look better organized and  
architected (no insult whatsoever intended to Felix, who did the job  
almost entirely by himself) than they ever have been.  That's progress.

>> There are plenty of FreeBSD and Linux distributions that already  
>> fill that niche more than admirably
>
> Neither of them features Apple technology.

For the moment, perhaps.. :-)

>> it would buy Apple precisely nothing to go head to head with them  
>> with a Darwin distribution.
>>
>
> It would buy them a head to head race regarding low level  
> technologies. Mac OS X without all this Carbon, Cocoa, Classic,  
> whatever, ... featuritis. Does Apple fear this competition?

No, and as I said in my message, projects like OpenDarwin are free to  
create such distributions.  Maybe they *should* (with all the desktop  
value-add bits) just to see how the concept works out in practice.    
Just because somebody doesn't run a race doesn't mean they fear it,  
it may very well mean that they have other races to run and only so  
much energy to devote to running. :-)

>> Apple has even gone so far as to co-found projects like  
>> OpenDarwin, [...]
>
> OpenDarwin was invented by Apple to get rid of those nagging  
> enthusiasts trying to get patches and enhancements into Darwin CVS  
> and up into Mac OS X. That's how it looks from the outside, Jordan.

That may be how it looks to YOU, but as one of the people who helped  
create this project, I can say fairly authoritatively that this isn't  
how it looked to any of us at the founder's table.  Those enthusiasts  
you mention were frustrated by certain aspects of working with a  
large, fortune 500 company with its own schedules, deadlines and  
engineering process and we didn't like to see them frustrated.   We  
wanted them to be able to move at their own pace, maintain their own  
bug tracking systems, openly discuss whatever they wanted to discuss,  
and have none of those terms dictated to them by Apple (which would  
be the case if you worked to our deadlines, used our bug tracking  
system and used only PR-approved channels of communication).

There are no black helicopters buzzing around here, Markus.  Just a  
number of engineering realities and the sorts of compromises that  
need to be made when dealing with the melding of two or more  
dissimilar cultures.   If you or Joshua want a monoculture, I'm sure  
any one of the smaller non-corporate Linux projects would be happy to  
see you join them, there's no need to go off and create a new OS if  
all you want is a 100% open group of software socialists who are  
fanatically dedicated to the notion that all software must be all  
free all the time to belong to.  They have their own politics, of  
course, but you'll never find yourself lacking for access to all the  
sources, patches and email messages that your heart could possibly  
desire.

-Jordan