site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Mark F. Murphy writes:
At 4:19 PM -0500 8/17/06, Dave Schroeder wrote:
The bottom line is that I think Apple needs to reconcile these issues, and not necessarily ALWAYS err on the side of secrecy and non-communication, especially in the context of dealing with larger/enterprise customers.
You're asking for transparency (something common in the open source community) from a company which doesn't live in a transparent business environment (i.e., trade secrets, competition, etc).
I just don't think the two can *always* be reconciled and to expect it so will certainly lead to unnecessary disappointment.
Apple could learn a lot from Sun about how to do a better job reconciling transparency with business needs. Sun has similar constraints to Apple, and yet OpenSolaris is *much* more transparent than Darwin. You can browse the source code to the development version of Solaris (Solaris 11) on line (http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/). Changes are integrated in the cathedral, but pushed out to the world every few weeks. Additionally, installable binary distributions (and the corresponding buildable source) are published every few weeks (see http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/onnv/). There are even 3 non-Sun distributions of OpenSolaris (Nexenta, SchilliX, and BeleniX). Contrast this to Apple, where you must join the ADC for $500 to get access to the next version of MacOSX, you do not even get the source, and you are banned from talking about it in public. There should be at least some middle ground where the "community" can get access to future versions of Darwin and help influence its direction. Most of the fanfare (and hence the secrecy) surrounding future Apple releases is on the gee-whiz GUI enhancements and eye candy that are Apple's bread and butter. Nobody is asking for that. The cool Darwin stuff in Leopard (Dtrace, true 64-bit support) are basically footnotes that the majority of Apple's customers either don't care about, or don't even understand. So I'm not sure what benefit there is to Apple from keeping them secret. Drew _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com