Re: Leopard Sources?
Re: Leopard Sources?
- Subject: Re: Leopard Sources?
- From: Andrew Gallatin <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 08:13:55 -0400 (EDT)
Quinn writes:
> I know of three main areas:
>
> o A significant chunk of what gets removed is comments. They might,
<....>
> o Some stuff is code that we received under non-disclosure from
<....>
> o Some stuff is removed because it relates to upcoming Apple
Can somebody explain why the removal of the proprietary code cannot be
automated? I get the feeling that there must be some poor guy going
over the code by hand, line by line, and getting approval from a
manager for each release. It is painfully obvious that this doesn't
scale.
> Having said that, Apple works hard to ensure that:
>
> a) Darwin can build and run as a standalone OS.
>
> b) You can slide a "mach_kernel" built from open source underneath
> Mac OS X, and things still work.
Not always. When the first Intel 10.4 kernels were released,
compatibility was broken because some padding was removed from several
key structures in in the C++ part of the kernel. This prevented you
from running binary Kexts built on Darwin on MacOSX Intel, and
vice-versa. I suspect this was meant to screw hackers who were
running OSX on white boxes, but it also did a great job screwing
people like me whose only way to test things involving PCIe prior to
the release of the MacPro hardware was to use Darwin on a white box.
I still have conditionals in my Makefiles to build for Intel darwin
8.0...
<....>
> Obviously it is possible to improve things in this space. For
> example, we could have a group of engineers dedicated to keeping the
> open source and the internal source in close sync. Doing this,
> however, would require Apple to rebalance its priorities: to increase
> our commitment to open source requires a corresponding decrease in
> the cool features that we can ship to customers (and developers).
>
This makes no sense. The whole point of a software company going Open
Source is to leverage the synergy of the community and allow your paid
workforce to be more productive. Given many people's irrational love
of MacOSX, I expect you'd gain lots of cool new features, and the main
problem would be selecting the best ones. With the OpenSolaris
development model, Sun provides an excellent example of how a
traditionally closed source OS vendor has opened their development
process.
Drew
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