Mac OS X Kernel Source Now Closed 663
littleghoti writes "Macworld is reporting that "Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system."
Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code."
Great news! (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Whiney OS X Fanboys are no longer going to say "OS X is just as open as linux" (what a stupid argument that was anyway.
2) Whiney Anti-GPL Fanboys are no longer going to point at Darwin saying "see, Apple contributes back without being forced too - why does linux have to be GPLed?"
Me? I'm just going to wait and see how much the discussion changes from the rumour that Darwin was going to close source (see this guy [slashdot.org] for a typical example.
Duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple might be worse than MS. (Score:1, Insightful)
TPM (Score:2, Insightful)
THANK YOU (Score:2, Insightful)
Apple (Score:1, Insightful)
Now they're beginning to alienate even their loyalists. If you aren't careful, Apple, people will begin to realize that you aren't a friendly, hip 23-year-old that talks to an aging man in a suit. They will know that you're just out to make money like the rest of the corporations.
(I love my G5 hardware.)
Who cares, really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I want my desktop and laptop to work, period. Keeping them that way is Apple's problem. I pay the (really, not all that much once you compare apples to apples, so to speak) premium in price to get a system that I can plop on my desk and run without having to be constantly tweaking and hacking on it.
This might make a big splash here, but in the real world, nobody will truly care.
Sad day (Score:4, Insightful)
So this doesn't come as any surprise to me. And I really don't have any ill will towards Apple, as I understand their position they are in. But I don't agree with the position they have taken but that is their perogative.
Re:AAAARRRRGGGHH! How could they be so stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is pretty much useless, and always has been.
Apple can still claim the same level of openness it always has, because all of Apple's open source Darwin components and projects (things like WebKit, etc.) are still open on x86 and PPC.
Take a look:
http://developer.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]
http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ [apple.com]
See my post here for details:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=185992&cid=15
I don't believe this is because of pirates... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an awful lot of drama though if that were the case but trying to figure out Apple's true motivations is always a crap shoot.
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:3, Insightful)
Users in demanding fields such as biosciences or meteorology do hack OS kernels to slim them down, alter the balance between throughput and computing, and to open them to the resources of a massive grid.
Sounds pretty useful to sophisticated OS X users to me!
I saw that part, and my first thought was, is that really true? Many hack the OS as a whole, but not the kernal. Is there a single example of someone hacking the kernal in a "production" system?
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds pretty useful to sophisticated OS X users to me!
To Apple, letting a relatively small population of niche scientific users "slim down" the Mac OS X kernel is massively outweighed by preventing the Mac OS X on x86 hacking community from being able to easily and quickly deliver an extremely polished distribution of Mac OS X for non-Apple Intel hardware, instead of the ugly hack they have now.
Most of the usefulness of "Darwin" in the enterprise, developer, and system administration communities has come mostly from the open source Darwin components and projects, period. Not the ability to rebuild or hack the kernel, and not the ability to build Darwin as a bootable OS.
Is it a loss? Sure.
Re:Good one Apple ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple: We can't seem to figure out how to stop people from taking our code and running it on none apple hardware
So, they close it up.
Awesome
With that attitude, you probably weren't going to legally anyway.
Wrong; thanks for trolling (Score:3, Insightful)
Parent is not redundant (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't really think of why anyone would want to run Darwin x86 without OS X either; we've already established that it's a worse server platform than Linux for most tasks, especially database ones, and headless servers are really the only place I think there'd be a market for Darwin. And it's not like there's any dearth of server OSes and distos these days anyway. The only other people are those who want to create a platform on which to do unauthorized ports of OS X onto commodity hardware (say by hacking the kernel to remove the hardware verification portions, and creating a foundation on which to run the proprietary portions of the Mac OS).
I figured this was inevitable all along. In fact, back when people were cooing over how folks had gotten OS X to boot on commodity hardware, I speculated that it was going to drive Apple to close up more and more of its OS, and I think if it continues, we're going to see a lot of phone-home type registration systems. To be perfectly honest, as someone who's always appreciated the fact that Mac OS has never had copy protection (because it depends on having a rather largish dongle, called a Mac), I would rather see Apple do what it needs to do to head off commodity ports with licensing than have them start to include obnoxious copy-protection in the OS itself that bothers legitimate users, a la Microsoft.
Normally I'm all for technological solutions rather than legal ones, but in this case the technological ones are going to be much more of a pain in my ass, so I'd appreciate it if they didn't. The day I have to type a serial number into Mac OS X so that it can phone home to Apple, I'm going to be pretty annoyed.
Re:Great news! (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the "Darwin" pieces that have always been open on PowerPC are still open on x86 with the exception of one notable item: the kernel. Most people who leveraged "Darwin" never even touched the kernel. Almost all of our any many other enterprise customers' usefulness comes from the open source OS components of Mac OS X and projects like WebKit, Open Directory, Darwin Streaming Server, etc.
For a time it appeared Apple had killed off everything but the GPL pieces of Darwin x86. However, that was a delay resulting from the fact there's basically one person at Apple packaging and setting up the sources for distribution. Since the subsequent release of the rest of the sources, Apple has done parity releases of all traditional Darwin components and projects on PPC and x86 - with the exception of the kernel.
In other words, the actual usefulness of what the vast majority of Apple open source users actually used "Darwin" for is still there. If you want to argue that its usefulness is all of a sudden severely crippled because the kernel is gone, well, in the enterprise community, one we found out that the rest of the sources would continue to be released on x86 as normal, the kernel being gone was barely a blip on our radar.
But hey, if people want to make a big deal and say "Mac OS X is now closed!" (what does that even mean?), let them.
Re:devil's advocate (Score:1, Insightful)
No, your about 2%. Embedded processors are in everything.
I was just wondering why I should care about this.
The same reason that 99% of all automobile drivers like the fact that they can access the engine if they wanted too.
Enjoy,
The Emperor Has No ... (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:1, Insightful)
(For those who don't recognise it that's from "Won't Get Fooled Again" [thewho.net] by The (Mighty) Who. Very, very apposite on this story I feel...
Re:The actual options: BSD vs 100% Proprietary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:**raises hand** (Score:3, Insightful)
Better tell all the L.A. studios recording all the music you hear on Macs, or the film shops using Macs to edit feature films. Etc.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
sad but completely understandable. (Score:3, Insightful)
I recall a few threads back an article linked to benchmarking the new Apple laptops, a dell running a hacked (read, stolen, a DVD image most likely DL'd from
any number of sites) copy of OS X was used as an example, this is both unfair to Dell (who I hate) and Apple (who I happen to like) the OS was configured to run properly on Apple hardware and by luck ran well enough on the Dell to run some basic benchmarks.
Apple has been submitting a large amount of code for nearly all of the OS that runs underneath their closed GUI (always has been closed) and this policy is sound for a company that attempts to make a profit, if it threatened their business model they would be foolish to release it and in the case of the gui it would threaten it to have others build the gui on linux or solaris or aix. Apple continues to submit source for items that do not compromise their business model, previous to the x86 move Apple had little concern regarding their OS/look/feel appearing on anything but Apple controlled hardware, it could be done (MOL as an example) but this was always out of the reach of the general population. With the move to x86 they have to rely on DRM (hate that too) to ensure that their profit (they're a hardware company?) continues as their OS is really only sold as an upgrade (not a full version like the folks from Redmond sell) and on the condition that you are running it in the environment for which it was designed (read the shrinkwrap license, which I also hate).
I would imagine that the module(s) for TPM are very cleanly written and very easy to defeat given a little effort and a recompile, if you've looked at any of the code Apple has released you'll know this to be true, with little to stop them we could be seeing HK and/or Chinese Macs (really they are already, almost all manufactured PC's are) rolling in for a bit less then Apple could afford to profit from.
As an open source advocate I am saddened to see this, as a stockholder I am quite happy.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:devil's advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that the only people who are getting wound up about this are the people who either don't like OS X to begin with or are reading the spin and missing the actual point.
Short version (was:Duh!) (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AAAARRRRGGGHH! How could they be so stupid! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The actual options: BSD vs 100% Proprietary (Score:3, Insightful)
And that never happens with GPL software!
Every ISP that used Linux and doesnt contribute code back gets a leg up with no return!
Every person that uses GNU Cash gets a leg up with giving anything back!
Just about every Firefox and OO.org users gets a benefit without giving anything back.
"The point is that by going with the BSD license, the freebsd team has made sure there is a propriety OS which will always be better than theirs."
Is OS/X better than FreeBSD? From what I hear FreeBSD is a better server platform than OS/X.
The things that made OS/X better as a desktop where never OSS. Even if they had used a Linux kernel the graphics system "Quartz" and the user interface would still be closed source. The people that download a copy of OS/X would still be pirating it.
What it really comes down to is Freedom. The Freebsd team choose to release their work under the BSD license. That is their right. Since I doubt you contribute code to that project and I know I don't what right do we have to complain?
I don't care (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a long ponytail.
I have a lazy eye.
I could stand to lose a few pounds.
Pretty much all nerd here.
There's no reason for anyone to care about this while they're getting work done. If you've got a product that's going to do/enable you to do the work you need it for but you don't use it because of libre/gratis masturbation, you're ridiculous.
2k at home, xp on the road, osx for layout, linux and hpux in the server closet.
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:2, Insightful)
The better question is, why not? People who fit into Apple's narrow marketing niche probably already have Macs. Those of us who are better served by other hardware aren't going to buy them either way. Why not sell the OS to people who'll buy it?
Re:Good one Apple ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Those are incompatible statements.
Well that makes 1 of you... (Score:3, Insightful)
But I think its safe to say that you are in the vast minority on this one. It seems to me that most people moved from Linux to OS X and not the other way around.
Just out of pure curiousity, what was it about OS X that pissed you off so much? And was Linux able to fix that, or was it a matter of just choosing Linux simply because you like it better?
OS X sure isn't perfect, but for my hard-earned buck and precious little free time, it sure beats the pants off Windows or Linux.
Re:bait and switch (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who cares, really? (Score:1, Insightful)
I've never understood why some people think taking what is given to you freely is somehow 'stealing'!
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't think this would cut into their hardware sales, dilute their brand, and create angry customers despite the fact that it's 'unsupported' you don't understand the first thing about Apple's market.
If you want to run OS X unsupported on a PC then go ahead and pirate it, I'm sure Apple doesn't care. If you seriously want to run OS X then suck it up and buy a Mac. You need to stop deluding yourself and think critically about how its in Apple's interest to sell OS X for beige boxes. First of all, it's not a question of whether they'll lose hardware sales, it's a question of how much. Would they be able to make up the sales with OS X for Dells? Especially given the stability and support issues? Seems like a losing bet anyway you slice it
Look, Apple doesn't have a piracy problem. They don't have complicated DRM. They don't waste money on anti-piracy crusades. They just do a little obfuscation where its convenient, and it's working great for them.
Re:Linux l33ts, welcome to Apple's world (Score:3, Insightful)
My latest idea is to start selling poo in a box on ebay, but with an Apple logo on it. I'll call it The iPoo, and I figure that if I can manage 3 poos per day, and sell them to Apple fanboys for around $33 each, I'll be making almost $700 a week from iPoo!
Once that gets old, I'll paint them different colours and announced to the fanboys "iPoo now comes in colour! Do not eat Apple iPoo!"
Re:useful purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
Your assessment is wrong. BSD code as used to make OS X, which led to a major usage of open source and GPL code, nearly doubling the probable user base of free and open software. More people are engaged in open source software than before, and yet you (expectedly to some like myself) twist this into a bad thing blaming BSD, rather than analyze the failings of the GPL license and the Linux camp in not getting those users onto your supposedly superior code and OS.
Your failing, not BSD.
And if your assessment had been right, as a BSDer, reading that statement of yours was makes me feel damn pleased, like watching an old bully get arrested for assault.
I was originally from the Mac then XP then Linux camp. Thought the GPL and Linux was the damn coolest concept, a free and modifiable OS. About 1 year in, I started to realize there was something screwed up about the community--they had this ideal on one hand, but drew lines in the sand against other equally beneficial but not identical software. They bitched as you do about proprietary ties but took money hands down with direct tie ins from companies which supported proprietary OSs.
To compare, BSDs ties to proprietary companies promotes their code use and interoperability. Proprietary ties to Linux often promote companies whose main income still remains shipping computers with Microsoft OSs on them. And you stupidly state they we are the bad guy?
The Linux camps ignored BSD for years too, such that when apps and the like came from proprietary sources that had open sources but restrictive licenses, Linux folks both compiled them, made sure they asked for Linux only versions, and ignored the BSD camps pleas to a) not use those, b) work with the parent company to apply pressure to change their license, and/or c) to come up with a BSD version. Sun's initial release of Java comes to mind. Took a bit before even the FreeBSD version was made available back then.
The Linux camp has been screwing the "open source" movement for quite some time to not include BSD compatible code, such that we don't really care what you think anymore--you've shown for years that you don't care to work with other open source projects in a mutually beneficial manner. In fact, there are
Even when the early Linux "standards" came to bear, we asked for some some consideration and inclusivity and very minor improvements so it would work with BSD OS's. We were largely ignored.
So now that you want to get on your soapbox and have us listen to you, we look at your foolish, misdirected, and frankly just plain wrong facts and notions and wonder "Why?" and "We don't want you." Use your own damn bathroom. When you guys went to bat for only your GPL camp, you lost out on the whole "open source" ideal, so you can't then turn around and whine with any substantial effect when you didn't care to work with us in the first place.
BSDers care about their software being used. Good code, good software, good proliferation, less restrictions on code use, compliant to standards. That's it. To that end, we've done quite well, in many areas better than the GPL camps; it's remarkable that you manage to attack BSDers, while you probably run your Apache web server, use OpenSSH, run some version of X, or the like, all of which have or had closer licenses to that of BSD than GPL. All run on your HP 'MS kotowing company' laptop.
Re:useful purpose (Score:3, Insightful)
Its okay (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, if it had been any other company, Slashdotters would be demanding public hangings at dawn...
Re:Great news! (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like you've answered your own question. Apple does not want you to run OSX on non-Apple hardware, because that might discourage you from buying Apple hardware, which is where they make their money.
This is speculation, not fact (Score:2, Insightful)
There is nothing new here, this has been the state of things for a while, no official announcement from Apple on this, and therefore no need to post such a piece with the sensationalist headline, as if this had just happened. So please check your facts before posting them as truth...
Re:useful purpose (Score:1, Insightful)
Wherever did you get the idea that commercial software packages couldn't reuse the source code? I can't think of any widely-used free software licenses that prohibit commercial use. Certainly the GNU GPL doesn't, as you can see quite plainly from the number of commercial distributions, many of them (such as Red Hat) selling Linux-based operating systems for the same price as Microsoft Windows.
I have to say, though, I totally fail to see how your devil's-advocate utopia of people taking other people's work without compensation fits into a capitalist society. Car manufacturers can't just take open-source engines for free and use them in their cars. That doesn't particularly seem to have hurt the auto market, now, does it?
Re:Its okay (Score:4, Insightful)
*MANY* has been the time where I've seen Microsoft, Novel, IBM, etc, put down for some move or another. And then Apple does the same thing a few months later and they are praised for doing it. I've also seen numerous instances of the reverse...Apple does something to control their product and get praised massively for it, then when Microsoft does the same thing six months later everyone starts dragging out the "M" word ("Monopoly") and cries for government intervention.
Bill Gates could eradicate world hunger and he would be chastized for it here on Slashdot. Steve Jobs could run over a group of nuns and orphans while on a naked drunken rampage and he would be praised for reducing the world's ever-growing population, supporting the alcohol industry, and becoming a nudist.
Re:Extremely old, and misleading, news (Score:4, Insightful)
After massive bad publicity, yes, Apple offered that - I don't think you've really managed to refute the OP's point. Apple are takers, not contributers to Open Source.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm bothering to reply to an Apple Shill. I note that when this story first broke, you posted the following: [slashdot.org] Like we're going to believe anything you post about Apple again.
Re:This fucking pisses me off .. (Score:1, Insightful)
Does that mean that one can still use the PPC version to compile for i386? And nothing happened? Or am I wrong? Please tell me.