[Info-vax] OT: Apple sits on critical Mac bug for 7 months (and counting)

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> It depends. Is Apple totally in control of the source code for their
> OS? IIRC, it was based on the Mach kernel from Carnegie-Mellon.


CMU no longer develops Mach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_kernel

Mach first ran on a DEC VAX !



And from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29
##
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system
released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by
Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free
software projects.

Darwin is built around XNU, a hybrid kernel that combines the Mach 3
microkernel, various elements of BSD (including the process model,
network stack, and virtual file system),[5] and an object-oriented
device driver API called I/O Kit.[6]

Some of the benefits of this choice of kernel are the Mach-O binary
format, which allows a single executable file (including the kernel
itself) to support multiple CPU architectures, and the mature support
for symmetric multiprocessing in Mach. The hybrid kernel design
compromises between the flexibility of a microkernel and the performance
of a monolithic kernel.
##



So it would appear that Apple has "inspired" itself of the other systems
such as AMch and FreeBSD to build Darwin and thus would have control
over the bugs etc.


> compare with with HP, HP uses open source Apache to produce SWS.

This is quite different. the proprietary version of Apache for VMS is
not Apache, it is based on Apache and modified to run on VMS. (aka: the
VMS code is not part of the official Apache distribution).

So if a bug is found in the real Apache, HP has to create a patch for
its own version of Apache (easier then re-doing the port from the
updated Apache to VMS all over again.


> Getting back to Apple, does anyone know how/where they get their code?

For the GUI portion, it is all proprietary

For X11, they get it from the X11 folks. (The implemented a new X11 at
10.5 to implement the most recent X11)

For the Unix part, they have control over the core. But they will source
many of the utilities from the open sourced unix.  And they also control
portions.

They control the printing subsystem (CUPS) and release it for open-source.