OpenDarwin Shutting Down
From the OpenDarwin web site:
OpenDarwin Shutting Down
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a
development environment for building and developing mac os X
sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative.
OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving
ground for fixes and features for mac os X and Darwin, which could be
picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources.
OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from
achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for mac os X related
projects. The original notions of developing the mac os X and Darwin sources has not panned out.
Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking
sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering
a system to host other people’s projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had
signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected.
It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.
Project admins for all active projects have been notified, and we will be working with them
to provide as seamless a transition to their new homes as possible. We don’t want to boot
anyone off, we will be operating the machines as usual for several months, until everyone
has had a chance to move elsewhere.
We will continue to provide email and dns redirection after the machines go dark. We’ll be
looking at what other redirection services are needed and can be provided after hosting has ceased.
The OpenDarwin team would like to thank everyone who did contribute to the project, and
our apologies to active, loyal projects that have to move.
Thanks, – OpenDarwin Core Team and Administrator
The only take I can have on this is that members may have been over-optimistic about Apple’s interest in using external concepts to integrate in OS X. Apple likes control, likes to keep it in-house, and ha a clear vision of where things are heading – even if it does not share it with us. Buy the time we receive some news about 10.5 and see it in action, 10.6, 10.7 are in the work, with a project tree already fairly well designed. What place is there for external contribution in that process?
So all the nice ideas remain third-party, optional ad-ons.
This being said, the closing of the OpenDarwin project is a sad day, if only because it provided a pretty good peer-review and exchange mechanism on the core of OS X as side effect, and this in turn had the potential of increasing both stability and security. Other mechanism such as Bugtraq exist for reporting vulnerabilities, of course, but none that I know are simple discussion of the core mac os.
This now leaves Apple in charge, and Apple has clearly demonstrated that, while fully diligent in keeping the OS safe and sound, and fairly prompt in releasing corrections when vulnerabilities are found, it still has Apple’s self-interest as priority number one, and no others. Apple wants the users to adapt to what the think is best for us – Spotlight’s imposition being a good example – because they know best. Too bad if you have a different opinion, there is little room for input.
OpenDarwin may not have fully realized its potential, but as long as it was alive, we could hope….