Comment by skissane
16 hours ago
> I suppose the Darwin kernel in Apple OSes and Linux in Android kind of count but people really don’t interact with those directly in a tangible way. They are way deep down under the hood from a user POV.
The XNU kernel is only partially open-sourced. And it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
It is better than nothing, but is more “technically open source” than “open source in spirit”. A lot of Darwin code can’t even be compiled outside of Apple because the open source code includes closed source headers.
It wasn’t always like this… in the early days of OS X, you could download an ISO of open source Darwin, install it on your PPC Mac, and it was actually a useable Unix-like OS (missing Apple’s GUI, but it offered X11 as an alternative). Then Apple lost interest-and got scared their (relative) openness was making life easier for jailbreakers and Hackintoshes-and nowadays you aren’t getting a usable open source Darwin without a huge amount of work to reconstruct and substitute the missing bits (which I know some people are working on, but no idea how much success they’ve had)
> it has a very non-open development model - development happens behind closed doors, no process to accept outside contributions, chuck a source code dump over the fence some time after each binary release.
Mostly agree re: your entire post, but, re: OSS above, does not matter, you don't owe an open development model to anyone.
I think there can be a difference between the literal and official meaning of a term, and what it most commonly means in practice - and that’s a descriptive claim about how words get used, not a prescriptive claim that anyone has some moral or legal obligation to do anything in particular