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I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible al

I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. Something that is stable and predictable for hardware makers to distribute and drivers to be written for. And inviting for the wider user base to adopt knowing that their favorite apps will run just the same. That would be a game-changer as pc hardware makers are at a dead end running Windows from a company that is not focused on its OS anymore, Linux unfortunately doesn't seem to ever cut it with the massses and app makers and MacOS is only available as a user hack in non apple hw. Now this would be a serious challenge. Everything from APIs to the ecosystem to the apps themselves have licenses and, righteous or not, would be game for lawsuits left and right should the project be a head turner at some point. This ex Apple OSX engineer in fact paints it as doomed from the start: https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-macOS-and-fork-it-like-Linux https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-ever-be-possible-to-clone-...

RossBencina 7y ago
I'm curious why you would claim that MS is "not focused on Windows any more". Win 10 Pro gets regular updates, still runs Win XP binaries, etc.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  Not GP but I would guess: "Cloud first, Mobile first" Satya Nadella
DCKing 7y ago
> I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source. The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway. Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too. Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1]. [1]: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
- wool_gather 7y ago
  There's already a Cocoa clone in GNUStep: http://www.gnustep.org/index.html http://www.gnustep.org/index.html
  - DCKing 7y ago
    People always point to GNUStep. But Cocoa is just a fraction of the frameworks you need on macOS, and GNUStep only implements a fraction of Cocoa. There's a reason Darling is just beginning to run graphical apps - nearly all the work is yet to be done.
    - wool_gather 7y ago
      Fair enough; I admit I've never tried using it, just browsed their docs and repo.

RossBencina 7y ago

I'm curious why you would claim that MS is "not focused on Windows any more". Win 10 Pro gets regular updates, still runs Win XP binaries, etc.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
Not GP but I would guess: "Cloud first, Mobile first" Satya Nadella

DCKing 7y ago

> I really wish the community would take over and fork MacOS at its lowest opensource/forkable denominator to start a free-as-in-Linux, MacOS binary-compatible alternative. As your Quora link points out - it's not feasible to do this. The killer features of macOS - the UI framework, all other OS frameworks, the interesting drivers integrating all of this - are not available. macOS more than other OSes is an integrated package. And that stuff is not open source. The parts of macOS that are open source are just sufficient to allow you to make your own Unix-like distro. OpenDarwin and PureDarwin are efforts that bolt on open source tools, X11 and desktop environments on top of Darwin. The result is an open source desktop like FreeBSD or some Linux distro. Then it turns out that the macOS kernel is not really a killer feature of anything, and if you're looking at an open source desktop you'd better run FreeBSD or a Linux distro anyway. Technically, PureDarwin is binary compatible with macOS. You can take the macOS version of, say, tar or grep, and it will run on PureDarwin. Any command line utility that doesn't integrate with macOS specific frameworks (i.e. all the stuff they import from FreeBSD, stuff from MacPorts) will probably work. That's not very interesting though. All that stuff is there on Linux and FreeBSD too. Your Quora link gives some big time and team requirements for this to happen, but it also touches on the fact that there's really no business model and lots of legal risks involved. At this point, I don't think an open source clone of macOS is ever going to happen. If we're going to get something that's close, it's not going to be based on the Darwin kernel, but something in the direction of Darling [1]. [1]: https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/

wool_gather 7y ago
There's already a Cocoa clone in GNUStep: http://www.gnustep.org/index.html http://www.gnustep.org/index.html
- DCKing 7y ago
  People always point to GNUStep. But Cocoa is just a fraction of the frameworks you need on macOS, and GNUStep only implements a fraction of Cocoa. There's a reason Darling is just beginning to run graphical apps - nearly all the work is yet to be done.
  - wool_gather 7y ago
    Fair enough; I admit I've never tried using it, just browsed their docs and repo.