What Is Darwin?
Linked by David Adams on Tue 8th Apr 2008 16:33 UTC
BSD and Darwin derivatives "I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren't interested in (or don't know about) the "lower levels" of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words "Welcome to Darwin"? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we're going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin."
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RE[5]: What BSD could have been
by nevali on Wed 9th Apr 2008 22:45 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: What BSD could have been"
nevali
Member since:
2006-10-12

Moulinneuf seems to be suffering from the delusion that there is “a BSD”, and that there is an active “BSD project”, and those people might or might not feel a particular way about something.

All of the operating systems (which are actively developed) which are considered part of the BSD family are derivatives. None of them are the canonical Berkeley System Distribution, because no such thing is actively maintained.

All of this bluster about whether Darwin is or isn't “a BSD” is mostly tripe. Talking about driver compatibility and binary compatibility is pointless: DFBSD, PC-BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD all have different driver models and run different sets of software. If it was all interchangeable, there wouldn't be any point in any except one of them existing!

Aside from the userland, CMU Mach 2.5, on which NeXTSTEP was based (and so is the ancestor to XNU), cannot be publicly released because it requires a license—which you can't buy any more—to the original (encumbered) BSD UNIX code. It has just as much in the way of BSD lineage as FreeBSD, et al, do. Lots of that code is still part of Darwin today, whilst other parts have been updated to borrow directly from more modern BSD, in the form of FreeBSD.

No , as I said in real Open Source , there is no restricted code or license switching in order to control an addition , you may have different branding/naming and different code added but the code its always developped and available as Open Source.

Any Apple-branded proprietary libraries and drivers are not part of Darwin and thus aren't distributed freely. [/q]

That's where your wrong , they are removed in the Open Source release , there also Apple branded **derivatives** and **derivative** driver , thats why Darwin open source don't do what Darwin Mac OS X can do and don't have the same size and code. [/q]

Look: if they're not part of Darwin in the first place, they haven't been removed. You're complaining that Mac OS X isn't open source. That's fine, but that's not what you're saying you're doing—you're claiming to be talking about Darwin.

And more to the point, what the hell is “Darwin Mac OS X”?

Have you even read any of the links you've been posting?

Given your fondness for Wikipedia, try this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29

(Note the “Source model: free and open source software”, if you're hard of thinking).

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