Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 26th Dec 2008 11:58 UTC, submitted by probono
Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.
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Member since:
2008-02-05
It's not very NT-like. It's a Mach kernel, "inherited" by Apple from its acquisition of NeXT. The Mach kernel has some interesting architectural features that make an open source Darwin-based OS an interesting idea indeed, and a worthy project to pursue.
Microsoft's NT kernel pretended to offer similar architectural features with all its dithering on about how it uses a "hybrid" kernel, but the truth is that the NT kernel just made use of some superficial characteristics of a modularized monolithic kernel without actually leveraging any of the advantages thereof. PureDarwin may actually prove to offer the kind of benefits NT only pretended (and failed) to offer, because of its choice of core architecture.