Comment by leoh
6 days ago
If they built as a kernel extension it would probably be okay with gpl.
There’s a huge opportunity for Apple to make kernel development for xnu way better.
Tooling right now is a disaster — very difficult to build a kernel and test it (eg in UTM, etc.).
If they made this better and took more of an OSS openness posture like Microsoft, a lot of incredible things could be built for macOS.
I’ll bet a lot of folks would even port massive parts of the kernel to rust for them for free.
My impression is they’re basically trying to end third party kernel development; macOS has been making it progressively more difficult to use kexts and has been providing alternate toolkits for doing things that used to require drivers.