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Apple Open Source Site

opensource.apple.com

59 pointspeeyek40 comments

Bummed there is no real ability to contribute. Or if there is, I'd love to hear more. I found a bug in an xnu syscall, submitted it and the fix to bugreports.apple.com a year ago and I don't even know if anyone has seen it.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10101/

How much is missing from that list that would be needed for OpenDarwin to work again?

Lots. More and more stuff has been disappearing, too -- usually as part of a rewrite that moves the functionality out of the existing open source project.

[I'm going to apologize in advance for the chaos of this comment; there's a lot of moving parts and - as the expression goes - sorry this is so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter. And holy fuck I wish HN had a markup language with more than 3 modes]

Funny you should mention that, as I just had a scratch at it this weekend. Although OpenDarwin has ceased operations as of 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29#...), the PureDarwin project has some flickering signs of life but just barely: http://www.puredarwin.org/ and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/puredarwi...

While I was roaming around trying to see if anyone was trying to get such a beast to run in modern VirtualBox setups, I discovered that Apple used to publish ISOs of Darwin (https://opensource.apple.com/static/iso/) but I was not lucky enough to have the CD boot in VBox, and I didn't get very far with qemu, either: http://althenia.net/notes/darwin

My interest is almost solely in getting PureDarwin up and running in Vagrant/VBox with some networking support, so making headless OSX build boxes will stop being a ginormous technical and licensing clusterfuck. I have a mild interest in ReactOS for the same end game, but at this moment I will benefit from OSX toys more.

Probably our best shot is to tag along on the coattails of the development that goes into making the hackintoshes run and support crazy hardware.

Separately, Catherine (of opensn0w fame) is porting XNU to ARM https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/xnu and https://github.com/darwin-on-arm/wiki/wiki/Building-Darwin so that should be interesting, too, in a qemu kind of way. If nothing else, at least the kernel is receiving some attention outside of Infinite Loop.

That's really really interesting. I'll have some spare time soon, reach out if you need some help/testing.

Being famous for its designs, Apple should have redesign this site. I am not good at UI/UX, but this looks ugly.

Jony Ive doesn't do HTML

This is amongst the least ugly of Apples non-consumer facing sites, some of the portals still have pinstripes from the 10.1 days.

It's just outdated.

The color scheme, skeuomorphism and use of Lucida Grande suggests it was designed a couple years back.

The CSS text shadows in the headers is just plain annoying though

And the bottom line:

Newest version are available here https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

> Apple, the first major computer company to make Open Source development a key part of its software strategy, continues to use and release significant quantities of open source software.

Uh... what?

Exactly my thoughts.

So what's the purpose of this site? To attract learners and contributors? To build a better source code browsing system? To build an open-source ecosystem? To promote the spirit of open-source softwares?

The half-assed design of the webpage indicates that Apple is probably not paying attention to it at all. So what's the purpose of this site exactly?

Isn't that obvious? To release the modified code used in some of the Free Software packages they use for their devices. It's a requirement.

No, most of the source released is not under a virulent license. They are not required to provide it.

Edit: oh wow, downvoted for stating objective facts that take seconds to verify.

I didn't downvote you, but the use of "virulent" instead of "copyleft" is annoying and imprecise.

Viral licensing is a standard, established, and widely used term, which also has the property of using real words rather than invented neologisms which have imprecise and incorrect definitions (from POV of real-world usage in OSS) in dictionaries: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/buzzword/entries/copyl...

Inventing new words for concepts properly described by old words is what's annoying, and it's really imprecise when people outside the specialized field start to have different opinions about what the neologisms mean than the people inside the field who actually use them.

You wrote that Apple would only be forced to distribute code under viral licenses, but licenses like MPL are hardly "viral" (they don't require you to distributed linked code) yet they still require people to distribute the original source. "Viral licenses" lose the nuance of weak copyleft.

That's besides the inherit prejudice in the choice of the word "viral".

The wikipedia article cites as the source for the term various Microsoft executives; so you propose we should use the Microsoft propaganda terms to refer to open source licenses?

Ah I see, you're just trolling.

> I didn't downvote you, but the use of "virulent" instead of "copyleft" is annoying and imprecise.

"viral" is perfectly precise. One of properties of copyleft licences is that they are viral (and need to be by design).

If being viral is a good or a bad thing, is another discussion.

How is a weak copyleft license like MPL "viral", if it doesn't extend its reach to any other code?

The purpose is to grudgingly comply with the licenses to all the FOSS software that they use in their projects.

That's nonsense. There are many BSD, MIT, and ISC-licensed packages on that site that they wouldn't have to release source code for.

This page dates back to the early 2000s, when Apple was a relatively small company after years of decline, and OS X was gaining popularity among UNIX users. They hired some people from the FreeBSD project (most notably Jordan Hubbard, one of the founders of FreeBSD). This was also the time that everyone and their dog was going open source (a trend started by Netscape).

The industry's open sourcing spree, their traction in the UNIX community, and the fact that they were importing a lot of new BSD code, probably moved them to make non-Aqua/Cocoa source open source.

Suddenly removing source code now would probably be a small PR disaster. So, they basically let stuff rot: some new stuff is missing and they are slow in posting new code drops.

Not every project is copylefted, true, but they are still trying to give back as little as they possibly can without raising too many hackles.

I'm not an apple fan, but I don't know if we know enough to say that this is their motivation.

As far as I can see, they're just using it to promote their products and their usage for developing open source software.

It's an indispensable source for those who build opensource projects on their Macs (such as I .)

For instance the Apple build of gcc is still needed to build some OSS projects, and they are probably found only at this site.

ResearchKit and more https://developer.apple.com/opensource/

The sources from 10.10.2 to 10.10.4 are missing. Is this somehow a preparation for the upcoming T(T)IP? Is the source still accessible for security firms?

Nope. Apple is just extremely tardy in general about releasing source; this has been the case for years.

edit: this even applies to LGPL stuff under the iOS umbrella. The latest version of WebCore available is from iOS 6.1.3; iOS is now on 8.4. I made an explicit request some time ago for the source corresponding to 7.x and 8.0, and after a while got 7.x (apparently they nevertheless haven't bothered to publish it on this site), but IIRC I never got 8.x. Need to check.

Usually about a month or two. A radar and/or email can help.

I love Apple's great contribution to Open Source.

Still no trace of Swift. Yawn.

They just killed every working, apple based program on 10.5.9 I'm stuck. No browser works. Won't update, and all their shit just crashes upon open...

Happened in the span of three days.

This is rather interesting, and raises a lot of questions for me: does this site exist for a long time already, or is it some kind of response to Microsoft putting tons of projects on github since last year (IIRC), or what is the reason this is on HN now?

Anyone knows whether the downloads of 'standard' software like git/clang are pathed versions or the original?

Why would they not have used github or similar? Internally they likely do use version control anyway.

I think it's been around for a while. Most of the things on that site are non-Apple-owned open source software.

(Stuff shows up on HN randomly)

From this site it seems to be at least 15 years old: https://web.archive.org/web/20000701000000*/http://www.opens...

There's nothing new about this page, other than software updates. It's been around for years. I don't know why it's getting posted.

There are plenty of reposts that make it on the front page, and they were expressly ok-ed in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html It got posted for the same reason anything gets posted: someone thought it was interesting, and it was upvoted to the front page because others thought it was interesting, too. Plus, Sunday.

IMHO, the community benefits far more from folks weighing in with their opinions or discoveries or complaints in the comments than the actual link itself.

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