site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com 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 -- _______________________________________________ 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