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.
With what is written above, it seems like the project became a SourceForge-like community rather than a Linux-like community. I am not part of the OpenDarwin community so I do not know how many people are actually contributing time and code to make Mac OS X better. How much participation did Apple engineers give? This is crucial to an open source community that spawns from a commercial entity. Take a look at how OpenOffice.org started, Sun still has engineers working on improving it.
Anyway, I am hoping that this signals a change in the kernel – to perhaps something like Linux (full Linux binary compatibility) or Solaris 10 (GNU Solaris perhaps?). Come to think of it, if Apple uses the Linux kernel, then I predict more Linux developers joining the OpenMacOSX fork. On the other hand, if they use the Solaris kernel, then they get the support of Sun, too! Win-win situation for both communities. [aside: Solaris 10 is already binary compatible with Linux].
If I remember correctly, KDE announced before that it is working on a Dashboard-compatible Widget engine. Wouldn’t it be easier if it runs on a Linux kernel? Hmmm… imagine, Mac OS X UI on Linux kernel – I think it will, hopefully, unify both KDE and Gnome into a single desktop environment but that is asking for the sun and the moon. 
Well, if it is indeed a kernel change – how cool is it for Steve Jobs to call on Jonathan Schwartz and/or Linus Torvalds (or Mark Shuttleworth of the Ubuntu fame) at this year’s WWDC keynote? Wickedly awesome!
Technorati Tags: Mac OS X, OpenDarwin
