On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 8:30 AM, Jack Norton <jack@0x6a.com> wrote:
erik quanstrom wrote:
Now, Plan 9's kernel is pretty old too, isn't it?
   

that's the point.  age is a red herring.

 
What has saved other 'popular' kernels from this?  For instance, no body ever complains about FreeBSD being a complex cluster, but it has pretty wide adoption (even as a 'desktop').  What about OS X?  Has Apple's arrogance and secrecy saved it from....  open source development?  It seems like they release code only after they are damn sure they've gotten all they can out of it.    

so you're saying that osx is not complicated?

- erik

 
No, no, it is, what I mean is that I haven't heard similar sentiments towards the open source released by Apple.   Apple's  'open source'  is  software that is developed in a closed source fashion, then released as open source when the time is right, as opposed to Linux and related software, which are developed, almost from the ground up, as open source.  This is the impression I get anyway.
-Jack

As a former member of the OpenDarwin project, I can tell you your impression of Apple's open source is pretty correct.  They like to share the source, and people are allowed to port things they do to other platforms, and submit patches and stuff gets into the mainline (like FreeBSD support for libdispatch and such seems like it's going to).  Or you can just fork it and make your own thing, but they're goal is probably the wider code review that the community offers more so than sharing and being a nice open source community member.

It is nice that they've started licensing some stuff under Apache instead of some of their other licenses of the past, however I really feel Apple's open source is more of a one-way street.

Dave