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

[Neil Rieck]

On Jan 31, 8:22 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the links and update. As an aside, I just discovered this
page which provides a little food-for-thought on what Apple is doing
with open software (re: Apple Public Source License)

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html

NSR