OpenDarwin not open anymore

2006.07.26

The project to build a free (as in freedom) Mac-like OS is dead. The team says it has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.

The reasons?

Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this.

I don’t know what commitment was there from Apple when the project was initiated, but they don’t look like a company who want to share information, let alone source code. As far as I know, Apple representatives speak in legalese, not the ideal way to communicate with hackers. No wonder the community was not interested.

But above all, OpenDarwin was destined to fail because it was trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist. The Cult of Mac is not searching for a way out of Apple’s tight grip. They just want more ways to play with the system. John Gruber speaks for many of them when he says:

I don’t want the source code to their software; I just want to be able to script the hell out of it.

Permanent Link | Filed under: Notes, Marketing, FOSS

2 Comments

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  1. drac

    July 26th, 2006 at 9:45 pm

    Correct me if I’m wrong but the Cult of the Mac was never the driving force behind the OpenDarwin initiative anyway. They already have Macs, an open clone would have meant little or nothing to them (except perhaps in terms of interoperability).

    The “problem” for some was that they wanted a more open system than Apple’s Mac OS X. They wanted (I suppose) to build up enough community momentum to pressure Apple into providing more source level support. This is not unprecedented in terms of ancilliary tool support either. Apple already maintains their own source trees of KHTML, gcc and the Sun JDK and they occasionally contribute fixes.

    I personally never thought it was realistic for Apple to give away the source to their jewel in their software crown, though. Sharing source for a few tools like JDK or gcc is one thing - sharing source for their entire OS core is quite another.

  2. Asela

    August 8th, 2006 at 1:25 pm

    …but they don’t look like a company who want to share information, let alone source code

    Times of change? via: Digg