“Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple’s OS X is now a proprietary operating system,” Tom Yager reports for InfoWorld. “Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code… The Darwin open source Mach/Unix core shared by OS X Tiger client and OS X Tiger Server remains completely open for PowerPC Macs. If you have a G3, G4, or G5 Mac, you can hack your own Darwin kernel and use it to boot OS X. But if you have an Intel-based Mac desktop or notebook, your kernel and device drivers are inviolable. Apple still publishes the source code for OS X’s commands and utilities and laudably goes several extra miles by open sourcing internally developed technologies such as QuickTime Streaming Server and Bonjour zero-config networking. The source code required to build a customized OS X kernel, however, is gone. Apple says that the state of an OS X-compatible open source x86 Darwin kernel is ‘in flux.'”
“Apple is in the unique position of losing hardware sales to software pirates. It faces the risk of cloned Macs being distributed in foreign markets where intellectual property protection is weak. I empathize. But there are ways to address the piracy issue without stripping the critical and defining quality of openness from OS X,” Yager writes.
Full article here.
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Peachy . . . but in other news. . .
. . . I want to see AAPL start heading up, UP, UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
pirates will be pirates…
thieves ruin it for everyone.
This is probably good news, mainly because Mac users will not be under the delusion that Mac OS X is open source in any way.
We’re not talking about the Pittsburgh Pirates are we?
if we are that pisses me off! I used to like them…Arrgh!
No, I think we’re discussing Steve the Pirate.
You know . . . from Dodgeball!
The movie that also had Justin Long in it. The “Mac” from the current “Mac & PC” commercials.
Huh. Six degrees of separation and all that.
“Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhh”
Maybe this means the rumors are true that Apple will be replacing the Kernel in Leopard?
(Not with the Windows Kernel, of course.)
Also, didn’t Steve fly the Jolly Roger?
I guess he found out pirates aren’t that cool after all.
This is news is at least three months old. Check the comments on Slashdot for more details.
This is not news. Nothing has changed in the status of the Darwin/Intel code since the Intel Macs first shipped.
The primary benefit to Apple of an open source kernel is that they can reap the benefits of all sorts of people developing, and they need to spend less of their developer support time debugging other people’s device drivers. The primary drawback is that anyone can read it, which opens it to problems with copyright violations and DRM avoidance. In the case of the PPC architecture, Apple judged that the drawbacks were worth the risks. In the case of the Intel architecture, Apple judged that they were not.
In either case, this judgment was made monthsago.
(The article seemed to be pretty confused, besides — I don’t know of anyone who recompiled Darwin as a custom kernel on PPC. The benefits to using an open source kernel are so that the community )
Someone cranked the FUD machine up to 11, methinks. (MDN word: “efforts,” as in “their efforts are pointless.”)
“I don’t know of anyone who recompiled Darwin as a custom kernel on PPC.”
I did when I was writing Kernel Extensions.
Of course, with 10.1-10.3, Apple had very little documentation for the Kernel. The general response from Apple DTS was, “Well, go look at the source code.”
10.4 introduced the KPIs, as I understand it–I’m not really in that business anymore–to keep developers from doing things that confused the Kernel. So maybe there’s less need to have build your own Kernel to try to debug this stuff…
I don’t mind, it slows hackers too.
No G6 for you!
For high performance statistical computing, OS X came in last place on the same Core Duo hardware. Interesting comments on how they hacked the memory management on the VT cluster for it to run at all efficiently.
http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/
The prices for parrots, patches and peglegs just plummeted.
Hmmmm…. he says there are “ways to address the piracy issue…” then doesn’t provide anything for reference in his article except to say he’s “addressed it” on another blog, which then doesn’t provide a specific link to these purported “ways” and from I can tell, would force someone to go find it with very little to go on.
Not very sporting of him to now come out (months later) and say that what Apple did wasn’t kind to developers or crackers wanting access to the OS X kernel and not be able to back it up with more solid reasoning as to why it was a poor decision on Apple’s part.
HacKinG, CrAcKInG and SteaLiNg is FuN. It cAn bE fUn fOr yoU t0o
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ViSit BitTorrEnt or LimEwire, or hey even AqUisIti0n
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G00 PIr8tEs!!!\
from the work that hackers are doing on the 4.5 and 4.6 kernels to make them work on “hobby macs”. i don’t think you need the sourcecode to eventually get OS X running on regular pc.
i guess they are balancing the number of people who will buy the OS if they can’t pirate it, against the number of scientists who would buy OS X and tune the kernel, who might stick with linux.
they are certainly going to lose many softcore opensource geek sales. the perception of openness was more important than any real use they got out of it, for a couple of my friends who bought macs.
Apple likes to do it’s work behind closed doors. Methinks this is more about changes due in 10.5x than worry about someone ripping off or exploiting the code.
When Next was developing their OS and Apple was developing Rhapsody and then OS X, they had a small group of people and a limited budget. Now Apple is flush with cash and has a lot more people to do the work. What benefit they got from Open Sourcing the code is mostly done and from here the road will all be inside stuff.
I think Mach, as applied in OS X is in for major revision or replacement. If they have chosen to do so, closing off the code would be very smart.
For high performance statistical computing, OS X came in last place on the same Core Duo hardware. Interesting comments on how they hacked the memory management on the VT cluster for it to run at all efficiently.
http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/
Complete and utter BS, debunked here:
http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2006/05/16/36/
This is a non-issue. Of those that thought Open Source was important, very few actually new how to take advantage of it. Beyond that, this group represented a very, very small portion of Mac sales.
Of those that didn’t, they don’t care.
Glad Apple is going back to shutting up their OS like OS 9, I’m tired of all these OS X exploits.
Kent Tekulve does NOT pirate software!
ahaarrrr! I’ll take ya OS for booty, if it be me last act!