From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 21:51:44 PST
Ernie,
I find this to be disingenuous. OS X is a proprietary system.
Darwin is just Apple's latest way to say "not invented here." It's invisible
and insignificant to the user, so of course it has to be different from
existing GPL and BSD licensed code. Duh!
I can tell you exactly one technical reason for Darwin to exist,
and that is that you could not link a GPL kernel with your proprietary
user environment without violating the terms of the GPL.
Apple is paying lip service to a fad. As will happen again....
Making the Darwin source available has probably a net
negative impact on the Free Software world. Why should Free Software
developers contribute to a
redundant, needlessly different, and actually captive OS? And if they are
the "Open Source" brand rather than the Free Software brand developers,
explain to me how contributing to Darwin furthers their commercial interests!
I can't see why a competent programmer would waste her time.
What part of OS X is completely invisible? What part of OS X is
Open Source? What are you smoking?
I could be wrong, but I haven't seen the Jobs Reality
Distortion Field cranked-up large enough to cover this kind of thing.
The irony is, that the installed Mac base is probably much larger
than the population of people who know anything about Open Source, so you
may, indeed, be able to sell them on it. Is that the right thing to do?
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but I do find the rhetoric to be
hard to stomach. I do not take Apple's actions as being in the spirit
of either Open Source or Free Software.
Eirikur Hallgrimsson
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Dec 06 2000 - 21:58:36 PST