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Open-Source Darwin Fades
The timeline is important here, so let's do the older editorial first. Here are some of the highlights: Once a change made it through the change control process, the change could be merged to HEAD, tagged, and submitted to the Apple build process, which usually meant your change would eventually make it into a Mac OS X/Darwin release. However, Darwin Developers could not submit to the Apple build process either. So, as a Darwin Developer, once your change made it onto a branch, that was about all you could do besides harass an Apple developer to take it the rest of the way. Pretty brutal stuff... You can see why people would want to start working their own development tree--it was probably the only way to work on the code at all. And ostensibly, this is what OpenDarwin was all about--being a joint venture between Apple and the Internet Software Consortium (ISC also develops and nurtures a number of other major projects, such as the BIND DNS server and the popular ISC DHCP code). Now for the latest OpenDarwin announcement: OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down. So that's the second attempt by the open-source community to work with Apple to end in failure, and not just a sorry-we-couldn't-work-it-out kind of ending either, but a nasty burn-your-bridges ending. This is a pretty far fall, given the kind of glowing admiration that was being expressed when Apple first began talking about open source back in 1999 (go ahead, Google for it). I've no idea what this means for the future of Apple and open source--my Magic 8-Ball is in the shop, thankfully--but it certainly can't be good news for Apple. At the least, the ongoing collapse of the open-source developer effort threatens to remove an important arrow from their sales quiver, and at worst it raises serious questions about whether or not the company is physiologically capable of expanding beyond a high-priced boutique platform for niche environments. « Daily News Podcast For Thursday, July 27 | Main | In Search Of A Low-Cost Wireless Internet Camera... That Works » |
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