OpenDarwin Project Shutting Down

niabok writes "According to a message sent by Rob Braun to the OpenDarwin mailing lists, the OpenDarwin project will be shutting down, saying that 'OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on.' The project's servers will remain online long enough to allow developers to move their various projects elsewhere."

At least there'll be some profit

[dada21]

With a PageRank of 8 and an age of 4 years, that domain will sell to some SEO company very VERY fast. I wonder what they'll get for it.

Sorry, but...

[megaditto]

Too bad their dreams did not work out, but frankly, they will not be missed.

Sure, they ported fink and some libs to Darwin, but that's pretty much it. ODP has been dorman for years, since 2002, pretty much.

Is Apple to blame for their luck of support? I do not think so; since they do have a neat thing going with http://developer.apple.com/opensource/ [apple.com]

Sad but not unexpected

[caseih]

Apple never supported the open source version of darwin in any way beyond lip services, some server space, and releasing source packages in mostly unbuildable form. They took from many open source projects but returned precious little to the community. At the end of the day Apple does what immediately benefits Apple. It's sad, but it's likely the threat of hacking OS X to run on white box computers likely is the greatest reason for Apple to not release vital parts of the latest OS X source code. Yet this will still happen. In the meantime, Linux continues to grow and become better all the time. There just was no need for OpenDarwin without Aqua. If all you want is a unix-like OS to run servers, Linux suits the bill just fine.

DarwinPorts

[Distinguished Hero]

I wonder what will happen to DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org].

I wonder

[Bartmoss]

I wonder if they're afraid that people would try to use the opendarwin kernel with mac os x for intel to run the whole thing on any machine.

Sad News

[Balial]

As a Darbat [nicta.com.au] (L4/Darwin) developer this is sad, and will be a bit of a set-back. We were hoping to try and become involved with the OpenDarwin community. I'm really sorry to see that this really handy resource will be going.

Re:I wonder

[mi]

This might be it... Or even better — porting the neccessary bits and pieces to have, say, MS Office for MacOS X (Intel) to run natively on FreeBSD (Intel), may turn out to be simpler, than getting WINE above alpha-quality...

Re:I wonder

[Bruce Perens]

Yep. As soon as Intel Macs came out, they stopped updating the open version of their kernel. Goals? I don't think goals had much to do with it.

Bruce

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Re:Sad

[aitikin]

Extremely unfortunate for those of us who are OSS enthusiasts on OS X Gentoo on OS X is lightyears behind Fink. No GUI, very little support, and an update right now is impossible, because they have so many bugs that have to be worked out. I just tried to sync my portage tree and upgrade everything and I get errors galore! If people put effort into it, I'm sure it would be useful, but there haven't been many updates on it in forever and the forums are a major dissapointment. Gentoo has also impressed me with the community it has, but the Gentoo on OS X forum takes weeks for a response.

Merely the latest in a long run of OSS failures

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. 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. Administering a system to host other people's projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.

So much for OSS "community" stepping up to the plate. What, is it only if you're taking on Microsoft that you guys give a damn about a project? And it's not a shock that many of you OSS devs were mooching off of OpenDarwin's servers to host your insignificant little projects, while contributing nothing to the OpenDarwin project itself.

Re:Don't fret.

[Rimbo]

Thanks for looking that up, and for the link. I, too, became a DarwinPorts fan after being disappointed with Fink. Fink has the better name, but DarwinPorts -works- better for me. I've never had problems with a DP package installing correctly; whereas I had all kinds of troubles with Fink.

DP's "it just works" capabilities means I get more work done.

Re:Sad

[timeOday]

We can argue about what "free" means all day, but OpenDarwin is a good example of why Linux adoption has left the BSDs in the dust - because the viral nature of the GPL binds all the users and contributors of Linux together (like the Borg :) I'm sure there are some days on which RedHat wishes they could fork off and go it alone, but nope, they can't.

Re:BSD's fault.

[styrotech]

I'm using OS X right now. I'm happy FreeBSD enabled its creation. I'm posting from Safari. I'm happy Konq's code helped Apple build this very fast, mature browser. Without totally free and open licenses like the ones I wrote about, above, we wouldn't have this OS X.

Are you aware that Konqueror is GPL? And that KHTML is LGPL?

Maybe Apple chose FreeBSD for other reasons than the BSD license? I'd say that their web browser is a strategically more important component to Apple and its userbase than some unix userland utils. If Apple really was anti GPL, they could've used Gecko as the MPL is closer to BSD style licenses than the GPL is.

Re:Sad

[hritcu]

Unfortunatley, it does seem to be hosted on the OpenDarwin servers, so I wonder what the long term plans are for the maintainers of the project. I hope it can continue to exist, as I for one would miss the nice ports style installation and management on OS X.

OpenDarwin was just a host for DarwinPorts. They will just find another host. The interest in DarwinPorts is high enough so that you don't have to worry about them disappearing.

Re:Apple has been pissing me off

[Guy Harris]

As the other reply said, Apple does not take anything from the BSD kernel

Wrong. Try looking at the bsd subdirectory of the xnu source tree; it's not "just BSD" - it implements processes/threads atop Mach tasks/threads, and has IOKit for drivers - but it's recognizably based on BSD kernel code."

The Mac OS X kernel is based on the Mach "microkernel", which itself used to rely on BSD code to fill in the gaps to make a fully functional Unix-like operating system.

It still uses BSD code for that.

Re:Sad

[m874t232]

though not Free Software because it doesnt' seem to like GPL stuff much, like many corporations

Well, I agree that Apple isn't giving back enough to open source, but they have no hesitation using and shipping GPL'ed stuff. Two important examples are gcc and bash. And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.

Re:Sad

[LizardKing]

And with gcc, for years, NeXT managed to comply with the GPL while avoiding giving anything useful back to the gcc project.

Apart from an implementation of the Objective C frontend and runtime. But don't let facts get in the way of your ill informed ranting.

Re:Apple has been pissing me off

[Vo0k]

Yes, don't do it the hard way - you might learn something.

I thought so too, for good 5 years when I was supporting Linux without any doubts.
Then there came several harder weeks, when I just had to get my job done quickly and efficiently. And as different problems started popping up, I would spend 5-6 hours a time seeking a solution, fixing them, getting no actual work done. Sure I was learning a lot of new things, but things at hand were delayed.

Now typing this from WinXP. Because the Ubuntu I have installed has several usablity problems I just cannot get myself to solve, to dig deep enough in config files and docs, to spend another 2 days or so reconfiguring the system to get it to work like -I- want it, to learn the keyboard shortcuts to all the essentials etc. First, that's 2 days when I'm not doing things I want to do, but ones I'm forced to do. Second, in 3-4 years another desktop manager will come, or the one I'm using will get "updated" so much that I'll drop it, and all I learn will become useless again.

I've been using AfterStep on Linux for 5 years or so, it was cool, comfortable, very customizable and above all, ultra-fast. After some time, the project "maturing" added lots of hard-to-disable clutter (comfort gone), became rather slow (and my style of usage required it to be ultra-fast!) and stability from acceptable went to poor. About a week of exploring and intense learning of the configsm customizablity and such, becoming an expert of the desktop manager, went straight to hell when I decided enough is enough and simply dropped it. With Afterstep 2.x it died for me. I haven't found a desktop manager I'd like since then, and I tried really lots.

Re:Sad

[TheRaven64]

Apart from an implementation of the Objective C frontend and runtime

Half right. The front-end came from NeXT. The runtime came from the GNU project. When you compile Objective-C with GCC you have the option of targeting the NeXT runtime, which is proprietary (and ships with OS X) or the GNU runtime, which is used by GNUstep and other non-NeXT Objective-C apps. Without a runtime, the front-end was completely useless.

Re:BSD's fault.

[mactari]

>they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.

Plagarism is failing to credit the source, while the BSD license requires proper atribution.

That's why I said that they "essentially". How many IE users know the code is based partially on Mosaic? Yet the "proper attrbution" is right there in the About box. MS took it, and now everyone considers it theirs. I haven't heard many blame the NCSA for winning the browser wars. That's essentially plagiarism. End of story.

>but these licenses are from nearly overly altruistic motavations.

Any non-commercial software (including GPL'd) is written from altruistic motivations. Who are you to say how far that altruism should go? Indeed, many of the major pieces of software we use wouldn't have become standards if they were under a more restrictive license.

Two points:

1.) Sure GPL is altruistic. BSD is overly so, imo, because it allows itself to become exploited, as has happened with OS X. This doesn't happen with the, IMO, "less altruistic" GNU/Linux.

2.) I won't tell you how far your altruism can go, but I will give you my opinion how far it's smart to go to prevent your contribution from becoming what some might call exploited. This thread is, in large part, about Apple not providing enough to make Darwin a viable open source OS. Why could they based their entire OS on Darwin and not passively partner with a viable community of open source hackers? B/c of BSD.

>With BSD's sabotage -- the license -- that help and the FreeBSD code
>has been thrown into the closed system of consumerist capitalism.

Apple surely wouldn't have used Linux, even if FreeBSD wasn't there... they would have paid some company for some closed-source Unix code, or perhaps have used the NEXT code directly, rather than accepting the GPLs limitations. The fact that OS X is a better operating system for the BSD licensed code is an indirect benefit to me, and you, and everyone else, while the alternative wouldn't at all benefit the public at large.

Absolutely right, to a point. I'd rather see Apple have to pay for new development than steal from open source. No, I'd rather Apple feel the ethical, if not legal, obligation to give more back to the FreeBSD community. Sites like OpenDarwin should not have to struggle to stay afloat. People should not have to complain about unbuildable packages being released by Apple. Apple should take their place in the open source community more seriously. They haven't.

Frankly, it's sad to see how the more extreme Linux zealots are using the BSDs as a scapegoat for all of Linux's shortcommings.

I hate Linux. ;^) There, I said it. As I implied in my first post, I use OS X first, and get this, I use Windows second. I like Visual Basic. No, love VB for some tasks. I think C# is great. I know asp inside and out. I hate using C. I hate Perl. I hate *NIX. [These are slight overstatements.]

This is precisely why I'd prefer Apple's millions in Darwin development had been given back to the community in a fashion that would have made both better. The GPL would have done that, as would a more ethical Apple. If you've got a better way of ensuring BSD doesn't short-circuit into one-way, lossy contributions to multi-national, billion dollar corporations, I'm ready to hear it.

How long till OpenSolaris goes the same way?

[whoopi_cat]

I say they'll muddle on for another year.

Re:BSD's fault.

[cbr2702]

Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?

Becomes part of the commons -- and stays there.

I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.

I don't know what the true motivations of the GNU Foundation are in promoting the GPL, but I do know mine. Software that I have released under the GPL has not been political. It does something I find useful and that I think others might find useful as well. At the same time, I put some work into it, and if someone makes improvements I would like to be able to use them. If I wanted instead to be sure I got credit I would use the origonal BSD liscence or one of the many other ones that require attribution.

Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.

When you release something to the community with the intent for it to be free, is it selfish to want it to remain free?