Comment by reactordev
12 hours ago
a lot of the kernel extensions are closed source proprietary. The core is still open but a lot of what makes modern Mac, Mac, are those kexts.
12 hours ago
a lot of the kernel extensions are closed source proprietary. The core is still open but a lot of what makes modern Mac, Mac, are those kexts.
how has that changed over the past 20 years? the proprietary parts of Mac OS X and now macOS have been proprietary from the beginning
There used to be a bootable Darwin instance that Apple published, which on paper would've made things a bit easier, but they stopped publishing it a while ago. It never resulted in any serious OS with a UI however.
There was a community around Darwin for a while, and people released Darwin distros that ran X11 and a variety of ported Unix software. You’re right that it never really amounted to anything serious though. Within Apple, open sourcing Darwin seems to mainly have been a marketing ploy to get Unix/Linux people interested in Mac OS X by tying it to the hype around the open source movement. There’s a good article with more information here: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html
3 replies →
By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.
Correct, but to dismiss the NeXT contributions from BSD into modern mac and Darwin would be to dismiss Darwin entirely. Macintosh from the System7 days was a dramatically different beast.
I think the point is that Darwin wasn’t really a serious attempt to move Apple toward being an open source company.
Open source software was used for the basis of macOS for Apple’s convenience, not because Apple intended to publish very much open source software.
BSD has a convenient license for these purposes and it’s why proprietary commercial products like the PlayStation 5 choose to use it.