Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 11th Sep 2009 14:15 UTC
One of the main new features in Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system has been released as open source. Apple has released the code of the userland portion of its Grand Central Dispatch technology under the Apache License, version 2. Mac OS X also has kernel support for Grand Central Dispatch, which is also released as open source via the XNU project. While we're at it, let's take this opportunity to look into exactly what Grand Central Dispatch is.
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Member since:
2007-09-08
The kernel component would be pretty specific to OS X anyway - it would have to be completely reimplemented anyway to run on Linux.
The compiler parts would be under the same license as the compilers - GPL3 for GCC, and the LLVM license for clang (looks like a standard BSD-style license). No problems here.
The rest of it is userspace. There would be no licensing problems at all with the daemon, since it's independent anyway. As for any library components that need to be linked to applications, the Apache license is compatible with GPL / LGPL (in one direction), so there wouldn't be any licensing problems with integrating it with glibc, or wherever it needs to go.
I think Apple pretty much did the right thing here. It just remains to be seen how useful it is, and whether anyone puts it to good use.