Re: we were opensource, once
Re: we were opensource, once
- Subject: Re: we were opensource, once
- From: Michael L Torrie <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:46:04 -0600
On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 23:52 +0900, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
> Hi,
> First a note that this is a whine. I know it is.
I really appreciate your comments. As a lurker who has never
participated in Darwin development, I think your comments very accurate
portray the impression I have had for some time now. Apple appears to
be open source, and indeed is in many respects (IE source code is
available), but the process is definitely no open. This is the letter
of the open source law, but not the spirit, and it is very disheartening
to me.
For example, I have reported several bugs to Apple regarding some
serious issues I had with Panther Server. These bugs mostly centered on
OpenDirectory and were likely in OpenLDAP and how it interacted with
PasswordService (which is closed source). Unlike fellow enterprise
competitors like RedHat, Apple's darwin bug tracking system is not open
and I was not able to see if my problems had already been reported. Nor
had I any idea if Apple's engineers were making any progress in tracking
down these bugs. Had this been RedHat, I could have had dialogs with
the RedHat engineers and developers over this. Fortunately, almost two
years later, the problems I experienced seemed to be fixed, so when I
speak about my LDAP problems, I'm talking more about the process than
the actual bug itself.
Of course, the source code to the pieces like OpenLDAP is available on
the opendarwin site as well as Apple's site. However, though the source
code is available, it is not buildable. There are developer-only
dependencies (header files, special frameworks for building) that are
difficult (if only because I have no idea how to obtain them) for us
mere users to get a hold of. I would have been perfectly willing to
dive into the code and try to identify the problems I had and help Apple
fix them, but I was unable to do this. Besides the problem of
unbuildable source tarballs, Apple does not cleanly separate their
addons and patches from the original sources. This makes tracking bugs
and problems outside of the Apple support system virtually impossible.
I would have loved, for example, to try the newer OpenLDAP 2.2 code
under Panther Server to see how it performed. However without patches,
such an endeavour is very difficult. So basically I have to consider
all source code from darwin to be a complete fork. This seems to be
counter productive because it cuts off darwin and apple users from the
community support that already exists outside of Apple. The OpenLDAP
developers, for example, cannot do anything to help with openldap
problems, even if the bug was actually in their own code and not Apple's
extensions.
I was initially encouraged by Apple's embracing of open source, but I
have come to realize that Apple is just as much a cathedral as Microsoft
is, only they happen to use (fork) open source code in a legal and
license-abiding way. Apple has clearly been advantaged because of this
and I don't have a problem with that, but I would like to see things a
little more open and transparent as you have suggested.
An open, read-only bug tracking system would be a great start. Having
clear patches to core code such as samba and openldap (opendirectory)
would also go a long ways. Finally, shipping a self-hosting development
environment (out of the box) would be a requirement to truly bring
darwin back to where you feel it once was. These are the things I have
come to expect and rely on in my traditional Linux world.
Michael
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