Wilfredo Sánchez, an important contributor at Apple's Core Operating System Group, where he "maintained much of the BSD user-level code in Mac OS X, and lead the open source engineering effort at Apple," has left Apple, according to his Website: "Though I no longer work at Apple, I'm still an active Darwin developer, and still maintain the Darwin/Mac OS port of software like Perl and Apache."
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The departure of Wilfredo Sánchez confirms that Apple's Open Source strategy was just PR...
The departure of Wilfredo Sánchez confirms that Apple's
Open Source strategy was just PR.
I don't see any evidence of that statement. YOU certainly don't provide any.
Stop it. You aren't doing ANYone any good with such statements. Unless you are Wilfredo, of course. But then you can't prove THAT either.....
Just stop it.
Come on.. Lets be honest.
Darwin is a half-a** attempt by Apple to get media buzz by saying that MacOS X is is "Linux-like" and "Open Source"...
but Darwin is far enough along that it isn't a disaster. Wilfredo pulled out some miracles early on, but with the base of regular contributors that exists now (Wilfredo included) Darwin is in good shape.
Darwin is certainly not "Linux-like" since it is a descendant of the original Unix but it is certainly open source. While it isn't GPL, that is an advantage to certain people. The problems with the license have all been resolved to most open sourcers satisfaction.
If anything else, the departure of Wilfredo confirms the strength of the open sourcing of Darwin. I'm sure he wouldn't have left if he didn't feel 100% confident ... in so many ways, it is his baby.
There is a LOT of activity in the Darwin community. Sure, there is a PR component to Darwin, but that is not the only reason it exists - it is as close to an Open Source core as any large company can afford to get, and it's paying off in spades for both users and Apple.
Sanchez left. That has _nothing_ to do with Darwin. Darwin is more than one person, and will continue. Sanchez is even still an active Darwin developer, on the Apache project... You don't have to work at Apple to contribute to Darwin - that's kinda the point.
And Sanchez didn't leave Apple to go to some "real" Open Source mecca, but to a new startup company where he will likely have a larger role than he did at Apple.
I don't think that Darwin is just PR buzz. It seems like a good idea if you have a somewhat modular OS. Make just the core part (which is alread composed of many open-source components) open-source.
Apple is trying to get on the open-source bandwagon, but not entirely for PR reasons. Why not try to make core part of the OS as bug free as possilbe?
Too bad the open-source community is not more accepting of Darwin. There is promise in it, but it needs more people in the community working on it. We know that it won't be able to approach the Linux/GNU size of contributors, but they could try to be more serious about it. Have meetings were they can deal out CDs with the source code on it, and really make focused goals. Getting Darwin to run on X86 is not going to improve Mac OS X on PPC! I don't know how much is in Darwin, but I'm sure there is other stuff that could be worked on.
~Mr. Jelly
Maybe this isn't the end of Darwin nor MacOS X, but an important part of the 'new' Apple is lost...
Darwin needs to be more open source than any other *nix OS. For one thing, the drivers are radically different, using IOKit, which is great for plug-and play. Opening that up makes drivers much smoother than just specs.
Also, Darwin needs to support various other components, like telnet and ftp, which need updates and patches, and you need a good idea of the kernel to do that. I think Norton will be taking a really good look at Darwin's innards to make a better release of system tools.
guess that this means that mac os x is finished and ready to ship
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Joined:
Welcome to the Valley
If anyone dares says "this is the sign of the END of Apple!" I will scream.
Its called attrition, every Silicon Valley company (or any big company for that matter anywhere in the world) has to deal with good employees leaving for other pursuits.
The grass always looks greener in front of some other company.