BSD & Darwin Archive

Find non-free code at GNU-Darwin, and get a reward from RMS. In preparation for this initiative, the team has greatly improved the software freedom status and GPL compliance of the newest free OS including the ports system, packages, on-line, and hard media offerings. It appears that the FSF wants GNU-Darwin to stay free. As always, many thanks to them, especially RMS, D. E. Evans, Eben Moglen, etc. It feels great to do the right thing, and that GNU-Darwin is finally inside the free software circle. There is also a longer article about this at Advogato.

The Darwin team announced the availability of the source code for Darwin 6.7 and Darwin 6.8. These sources correspond to Mac OS X 10.2.7 (for G5s) and Mac OS X 10.2.8 (for G3/G4s), respectively.

The end of an era for BSD/OS: Yesterday, on the bsdi-users mailing list, it was reported that Wind River Japan had announced that they will be discontinuing BSD/OS Internet Server Edition (ISE) on Dec. 13, 2003. The final version of BSD/OS, BSD/OS 5.1 ISE, will be available as an upgrade for 5.0 ISE customers in October with sales ending on December 31, 2003. This will be available in binary and binary with source code, as with previous releases.

"And if you were just shopping around, just considering Linux and hadn't looked at a BSD, you may want to reconsider and do some comparing between the systems. You might find that a BSD will be a better fit." Read the editorial at eWEEK.

In December of 1996, Apple acquired NeXT Software. The reason for the acquisition was so that Apple could finally make a modern operating system for their users. They searched high and low for a OS to be the foundation for their new OS. Among the candidates, Windows NT which never even made it past the first stage. Then came Solaris, but Apple and Sun could not agree on the licensing terms and the idea was crushed.

OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is announced, available immediately for both ppc and x86 architectures. OpenDarwin 6.6.1 is based on the Darwin 6.6 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.2.6) source release and licensed under the APSL. It includes additions and modifications from the OpenDarwin CVS Repository.

For software developers who wish to test/port applications to Darwin, a new box running x86 Darwin has been made available by the Opendarwin project.

MacNN reports that the Darwin team today posted the Darwin 6.5 source code, corresponding to Mac OS X 10.2.5. "Darwin 6.5 is what we call an 'on-cycle' source-code release, where the corresponding Darwin source is made available soon after a new release of Mac OS X to customers." Several projects (e.g., gcc, gdb, CUPS, Rendezvous) will continue to do 'off-cycle' releases, according to the developer, whereby the source code is updated more frequently than our commercial releases.

Although GNU-Darwin can be viewed as a standalone OS for x86 and PowerPC architectures, it is also a source of free software to Apple users.

The GNU-Darwin project is now considered stable and it has reached 1.0 status (it seems that the latest beta will be marked as 1.0). Download from here, packages, ports.

Developments in the *BSD area, such as the OpenSSH project, have greatly benefited Linux. By the same token, Linux companies have funded a lot of work on software like GCC and Wine that is also used on *BSD systems. Read the editorial at OSOpinion.

As stated in the previous OSNews article our project, Yamit, is trying to address some shortcomings of Mach that are usually results of insufficient tuning (sometimes caused by the fact that code comes from the 80's).

What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply (incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system." The correct answer, however, is more complex than that. BSD is -- among other things -- a culture, a philosophy, and a growing collection of software, most (though not all) of which is available for free and with source code.

The OpenDarwin cvs has been updated with the latest xnu sources. The Tag for the branch corresponding to OpenDarwin is OD_APPLE_10_2. Information on getting the sources is available here while you can report bugs here.