Apple closes down OS X ???
Geeky, Hardware May 19th, 2006
I am not sure whether this is just rumour or not, but I read the following on InfoWorld.
Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple’s OS X is now a proprietary operating system.
Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS.
What is that supposed to mean? A way to address piracy! There are many other ways to address such issues, as many other companies practices. After all the OS is based on Darwin open source Mach/Unix core …. is this allowed by the license?
Though I am not an OS X user, as of today at least, because I was thinking of getting me one as they are much better priced now compared to the premium Apple used to charge when they had PowerPC based platforms, I am now getting inclined more towards not getting me a Mac anymore. And being frank I really came to like their new MacBook, especially the black version.
If OS X will become proprietory OS = that’s for sure no “go” for me.
Entries
May 19th, 2006 at 5:22 am
Maybe this is becasue they plan to release it to run on Intel only PCs.
I’m sure there will be millions of people who would switch to an intel only verson os OSX.
Me included….
May 19th, 2006 at 5:32 am
You will switch as you are probably a Mac user, if not veteran, or perhaps cause you see Mac OS X better than Windows, which is of course true, but my decision comes from that it not being open source makes me angry and then as I want to support open source philosophy, not just speak about it, I start loosing interest for this platform.
I still don’t understand, how can they make it proprietary using open source code – as far as I understand this is not allowed according to license … or maybe I had too much beer yesterday
May 19th, 2006 at 5:40 am
It is a shocking bit of news, I saw it yesterday but wasnt sure if its true or not.
Apple havnt got a massive market share, I think they are thinking a little to highly of themselfs, and surely its only going to mac OSX more like windows, putting of developers for mac even more due to them not being able to tinker or change bits of the OS or fix problems that affect their programs.
May 19th, 2006 at 8:57 am
I think it’s a bad strategy, although a sensible one from Apple’s point of view. Apple has been very much a hardware company, so they have never had to worry about piracy of their OS’s, since each computer came with a copy of the OS.
Now they’re afraid that people will not only might copy OS X, but also force Apple to make OS X PC compatible. IMHO, that’s a greater threat to Apple than piracy, since they’d lose an enormous amount of money on competition in the hardware field.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:07 am
If they keep their now-how and design bureau working as they have always been, and an innovative company plus with a true legion of Mac dedicated users – i don’t think they will loose. -My personal thoughts.
May 19th, 2006 at 9:21 am
Sorry if the following sounds a bit harsh but I’m sick of all the crap that’s being thrown around about this.
Apple are a hardware company first and a software company second. This is why Mac OS will never run on a generic PC. Microsoft charge £200-300 for an XP licence (OEM doesn’t count and is tied to your mobo), Apple charge £80, they aren’t in it for software sales.
Please ignore all the rubbish about Mac OS X being Open Source and Apple stopping. Mac OS X has *never* been Open Source. The UNIX layer underneath it is made available as Darwin, the real Apple bits (Aqua, the GUI, for one example) are not.
Another thing is just because something’s Open Source it doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. The BSD Licence allows close-source use, and the AAPL licence that Apple released Darwin under is very similar. Before anyone claims how unfair this is Apple have never accepted any patches from anyone outside the company so the ownership of the code is, and always has been, theirs. They just let everyone look and play with it.
Anyway there’s no need to recompile the kernel. Drivers don’t live in the kernel and Apple’s driver dev kit is free and comes with the OS.
Since Apple are a hardware company letting people run it on other machines is insane so they want to lock it to their platform. In the past that’s been possible because of the CPU, now they need another way. If they leave the kernel source open people will modify it and ‘illegally’ run it on another machine. Note the illegally in that sentence, you’re only allowed to run Mac OS X on Apple hardware, anything else voids your licence. If you don’t like that don’t use it. Just because you don’t agree with a contract that doesn’t mean you can just break it (assuming that you agreed with it in the first place).
Mac OS X is still a great platform for Unix people since it let’s us have the benefits of Unix without all the other baggage that comes with it. 99% of the people that are moaning about how terrible this is either don’t own a Mac or have never compiled a kernel in their life. Apart from that 1% there’s nothing you could do yesterday that you can’t do today.
May 22nd, 2006 at 12:48 pm
He's got a point, if you think about it. If it were a different license I'm not sure this would be allowed, but because Darwin is base upon BSD, it's allowed under the BSD license. Good thing this is only for the Intel-version of the kernel, from what I hear the PPC version is still up and open for everyone to pick at.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:46 am
In the Fed-Talk mailing list, Ernest Prabhakar (Apple's product manager for Open Source & Open Standards) denies that Apple is going to close the Darwin kernel for x86: "Just to be clear, Tom Yager was speculating about why we have – so far – not released the source code of the kernel for Intel-based Macintoshes. We continue to release all the Darwin sources for our PowerPC systems, and so far have released all the non-kernel Darwin sources for Intel. Nothing has been announced, so he (and everyone else) certainly has the right to speculate. But please don't confuse 'speculation' with 'fact'."