Wilfredo Sanchez Leaves Apple

An unnamed correspondent writes: "At least, that's the rumor on the street. Wonder what this will mean for Apple's Darwin project?" The rumor is confirmed, boys and girls, Wilfredo Sanchez has indeed left Apple. A statement is on his Advogato page; apparently he has gone to KnowNow. Sanchez says on that page too that he'll still be involved with Darwin maintaining Apache and Perl for that platform.

I CAN SEE THE FUTURE.

With my mighty psychic powers and common sense, i can tell what this Slashdot thread will look like in 24 hours:

• There will be between 110 and 160 comments, no more than 106 of which will have score:1 or higher.
• At least 30 posts will be gibberish.
• At least 40 posts will viciously attack apple in a completely unreasonable manner.
• At least 20 posts will viciously attack apple for things that it is quite reasonable to attack them for, but which have little or nothing to do with Wilfredo Sanchez leaving apple.
• At least 10 posts will contain bizarre vicious attacks on BSD from people who, upon examination, appear to be slightly unclear on what exactly BSD is.
• No more than fourteen posts will actually be informed.
• There will be between 10 and 30 posts which are well-thought-out and in general worth reading, but not particularly helpful or directly relevant.
• No more than six posts will have anything directly to do with Wilfredo Sanchez.
• There will be at least one utterance of the words "I will no longer be doing with apple computer" from an individual who has never owned an apple product in their life.

Awesome buzzword desnity

''Our Zero-Install JavaScript microserver transforms static Web pages into Dynamic HTML user interfaces by wiring them into a peer-to-peer XML message bus. By sidestepping the cost and incompatibilities of Java or ActiveX applets, ESP app developers can immediately leverage the massive installed base of 4th-generation Web browsers. Furthermore, choosing to route across the KNN can leverage our pre-provisioned real-time content, security, peering with wireless carriers, and personalized prioritization engine to deliver the right information, at the right time, on the right device, to the right people & programs.''

Good job they went stealth, buzzwords this dense could easily have ripped space-time.

Re:Is OS X taking off?

As Jobs said in his MacWorldExpo keynote, they expected to sell 10k of the MacOS X Public Beta and they sold 100k. The release won't ship until 3/24, but it is really solid.

I've had two issues with it:

1) Connecting from an old Mac to the X box using FileSharing over TCP/IP caused the Mach kernel's AFP layer to harf. To get the service going again, I had to restart (kernel services being a bummer that way). This was a known limitation; I just didn't know it.

2) There was some issue where it wouldn't create additional terminal windows and, when pushed, it eventually wound up with a kernel panic. I sent in the backtrace. This was apparently also a known problem with some kind of memory leak.

Minor stuff really, not problems I'd have in everyday use.

But for using, hard, a beta OS for a couple months, not a bad track record. It will replace Linux as my home desktop OS (already has for the most part); it has more creature comforts to offer and, with open source under the hood, little of the prior MacOS's disadvantages.

_Deirdre

Re:Calm down, guys!

...and by the way, I always have to laugh at Linux maniacs who have the attitude that they're the hyperrational ubergeeks while the rest of the world chooses their technology according to marketing, eyecandy or some other "Joe Sixpack" criterion. Meanwhile, their primary concerns are 1) translucent shading and 2) which free software celebrity is putting his name on it.

Advocates of Freehand and Illustrator have some nasty flame wars, but you don't see them dropping developers' names like fashion slaves talking about designers.

Alfredo's post to the darwin dev list

To: Darwin Development
Subject: In case you haven't heard

You may have noticed that my email now tends to come from MIT instead of Apple.

I no longer work at Apple. I now work for a company called KnowNow.
My last day at Apple was Friday 2/2.

You may also have noticed that I've since then helped Chuck import cscope, fixed a nasty in mod_perl, fixed up libtool some because I'm porting (Apache) APRlib to Darwin and tweak flex to install libfl.a as a link to libl.a. You might therefore come to the conclusion that my involvement with Darwin is not exactly over, and you would be correct.

For what it's worth, I've left those things I can no longer reach in good and capable hands; I couldn't have left them otherwise. As the one guy on "Dark Angel" says: "It's all good, all the time."

Pleasant hacking,
-Fred

Wilfredo Sanchez - [e-mail]

Information about KnowNow

Their actual page [knownow.com] seems to be like that of Transmeta pre-2000... but the Google cache works wonders. [google.com]

Sure enough

Yep.

Waitaminute

Wilfredo Sanchez still has commit access on FreeBSD and Darwin, so even if he's gone to work for someone else, he still has the power to effect the code of major projects.

Provided that FreeBSD remains as popular in the server market, and provided that Apple continues to integrate improvments in Darwin into their commercial release of OsX, then I expect we'll be seeing more work from Wilfredo Sanchez in the products we use.

No cause for alarm.

A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close

Calm down, guys!

Look, I know from following the Darwin lists that Wilfredo Sanchez is a huge contributor but -- front page Slashdot news? The Mac sites aren't making such a big deal about this. It's not like Steve Jobs or Avie Tevanian is leaving.

The free software world has this habit of latching on to whichever developer brings himself to their attention. Just try to explain to people that Jamie Zawinski didn't singlehandedly write Navigator or that Jason Haas isn't doing PowerPC Linux entirely on his own.

Again, no disrespect to Wilfredo (or JWZ or Jason, for that matter). I know he was extremely important in OS X development. But this sort of "Stop the presses! RASTER QUIT HIS JOB AT RED HAT!" mentality strikes me as more appropriate for Tiger Beat.