25 ms·

Why Darwin failed (2006)

93 points by jckahn 4y ago

frozenport 4y ago
Was anything really lost? You have a few engineers with hurt feelings and Apple lost the potential for some contributors to fix issues (at the expense of security by obscurity). Did the world really need another open source OS?
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  It does sound like a big deal until he quietly mentions half the engineers hired we’re like 3 to 4 people lol. Darwin is a big deal in that it’s backed by one of the 5 largest tech companies. But when you look at it, it’s essentially just Mach with FreeBSD (NetBSD core utils in PowerPC days) bolted on top.
karmakaze 4y ago
> Apple's Open Source efforts with the Darwin project have been a failure. Apple failed to build a community around Darwin in the 7 years since its original release because it was not a corporate direction, but rather a marketing stunt. Culturally, Apple did not and does not understand what it means to be open source or to build a working community. WebKit[0] would be a counter-example. Maybe Darwin didn't have value beyond what Apple was doing with it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit
- ajross 4y ago
  WebKit is LGPL only because it began life as an (internal!) fork of the KDE Konqueror codebase. And the lack of community stewardship from Apple led to it being forked again into Blink/Chromium, which has largely taken over the mantle[1] of "standard open source HTML engine". WebKit itself is hugely successful because of its use in proprietary projects basically. It's "open source" only by accident, and it seems pretty clear Apple would prefer it not be. [1] Not that Chromium is a particularly great example of an open source project, but lots of people outside Google build it, ship it, and contribute.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    I read that one of the biggest driving forces of Google forking WebKit into Blink was an increasingly large gap in the direction that the two companies wanted to take the engine, including differences on things that both parties agreed should be implemented (I seem to remember there being a difference of opinion on how to implement multi-process architecture for example), making it progressively more difficult for the two to coexist on the same codebase. Was that not true? Certainly today WebKit and Blink are significantly different engines with very different performance profiles.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      That's about right. WebKit continues to be used by Apple, and finds its way embedded into a lot of platforms like game consoles.
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      This is correct, although I wonder how much they still contribute between the projects. Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions (and everything, natch), but individual contributors pop up contributing to all sorts of things. And WebKit isn’t as isolated as it might seem, just today I saw tweets about some big perf improvement contributions from the creator of Bun who’s definitely contributing for his own purposes. If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.
      - sharikous 4y ago
        > Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions Really? I see a lot of contributions from Apple engineers to the LLVM codebase
        eyelidlessness 4y ago
        My understanding is that, apart from high profile involvement in certain projects (like LLVM), Apple engineers generally contribute “as individuals” without much to indicate they’re working for Apple. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve heard it.
- lmm 4y ago
  In addition to the other reply, note that Webkit only happened when the KDE developers (whose code WebKit was originally forked from) kicked up a fuss about Apple's misleading marketing of this as a successful open source engagement. Apple were originally doing bare minimum tarball dumps (which, to be clear, KDE had no real problem with in itself - that's widely accepted as a legal way to work with LGPLed code) until they got called out.
gumby 4y ago
News flash: big company only does things in its interest. When Apple was trying to escape from its near death experience (imac era) they were super enthusiastic about open standards (JPEG, MP3, iCal, et al.). When I say "super enthusiastic" I mean to the point of Jobs touting that on stage. Of course they also paid adobe and Microsoft for access to some of their very popular formats. They paid for USB and made one of the first, and as is usual for them, most strict and compliant, implementations. They were probably the first consumer 802.11 companies. As much as possible they wanted to talk to as many things as possible. As they clawed their way back those standards were still OK (and still are -- Apple is actually pretty good at supporting open standards, better than most in my experience) but they didn't care as much about going off in their own direction again, and making those their defaults.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  One big example was OpenGL adoption, nowadays the FOSS folks get salty with Metal, yet the pre-Jobs revival Apple was doubling down in QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw VRML, they couldn't care less about OpenGL.
- mmphosis 4y ago
  > When Apple was trying to escape from its near death experience (imac era) The "imac era" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#History Steve Jobs reduced the company's large product lines immediately upon becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997 ... The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    The “era” definitely began then but definitely didn’t have much impact other than cultural until a few years later. Really it should be called the iPod era, but even that lagged a while as Apple gave up on mainstreaming FireWire.
    - gumby 4y ago
      The iMac really did keep apple from falling down the well and dying. They were busy throwing whatever they could into the fight, and (to mix metaphors) tossing overboard anything that didn’t help. This was the era of iTunes, iDVD and iEverythingElse. The iPod was at first something to plug into that nascent iEcosystem. It began a period of growth.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. I think this is more a function that Apple created the best lightweight Unix laptop at that time. Windows laptops at that time had horrible command line experience and did not play well with Unix/Linux which is what most web servers were running on. Linux laptops had horrible hardware support.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > Windows laptops at that time had horrible command line experience and did not play well with Unix/Linux which is what most web servers were running on. In 2006, the main reason for Linux was to fix things Microsoft broke, which upon discovery Microsoft would break again, and Linux devs would again restore functionality to Windows networks. So your first point here is somewhat true, Microsoft did not play well with Linux which was moderately successful at playing well with Microsoft. In 2006, however, most webservers did not run Linux, hardly any did, in fact. Linux took over the data center about 5 years later. In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD w/ Apache, and if not for fanaticism, this would still be true today, because there was and is absolutely nothing wrong with NetBSD that Linux fixes.
  - heywoodlh 4y ago
    > In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform. Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together). My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable. [1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_survey.html https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web...
wahern 4y ago
Apple still regularly releases large portions of macOS. Confused about some poorly documented keychain behavior? Just look at the source, e.g., https://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-59754.80.3/OSX/libsecurity_keychain/lib/SecItem.cpp.auto.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-59754.... https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/Security-59754.80.3/OSX/libsecurity_keychain/lib/SecItem.cpp https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/Sec... Access to such source code is not nothing, and certainly seems more than just a marketing gimmick.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  They were always releasing code, that wasn’t the problem. They clearly never helped to make it a usable standalone oss product, at all. Just look at what the author said about breaking backwards compatibility upstream, with no regards to non Mac Darwin. It’s melodramatic to call what Apple did a “marketing stunt”, but that code on its own is pretty useless.
  - skohan 4y ago
    Similar behavior is what turned me off of Swift. I still think it’s a nice language to write, but I tried to adopt it on Linux and the situation with tooling was so horrendous. Lots of things were under-supported or under-documented, and every release would break things in unexpected ways. I don’t know if it was intentional, or a lack of priority, but I got tired of having to work so hard just to get my programs to compile.
    - tempodox 4y ago
      My own anecdotal experience is that it's not that much better on Apple's platforms. Documentation may have gotten the tiniest bit better, but there's still way too much information missing. And Apple's platforms are a constantly moving target. It may turn out tomorrow that the work required to keep up is just too much. Too many incentives, IMO, to not develop for these platforms if one can avoid it.
Maursault 4y ago
How the heck did PureDarwin crawl out of those ashes 9 years later with a preview release of Darwin 9 with an X11 GUI (PureDarwin Xmas), followed three years after that by a command-line only 17.4 Beta based on Darwin 17 (corresponding to macOS High Sierra (10.13.x))? PureDarwin is quite simply impossible because Apple doesn't understand or care about OSS.
- etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
  I just booted the 17.4 beta in a VM. It does work, but can't really do much in its current form. Interesting nonetheless!
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Wifi is not going to work, but ethernet should. To do anything at all with it, you'd need to install MacPorts and start building packages. You can make it a DAMP nearly effortlessly using MacPorts.
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > PureDarwin is quite simply impossible because Apple doesn't understand or care about OSS. In an alternate reality it would be so cool if you could run MacOS apps on an open source OS. Maybe Darling[1] will one day get us past the point where you could run any MacOS app on Linux (not just simple GUI or CLI apps). That being said there aren't really any apps that I use that aren't available on Linux. But the option to would be nice! [1] https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/
dirtyoldmick 4y ago
Having a proper terminal was the main reason I bought a macbook pro back in 2007.
makeitdouble 4y ago
> Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. To push a bit further, a bunch of us switched to OSX not from windows but FreeBSD or linux. Hardware support for open source OSes was abysmal and getting commercial software to run on even linux was death by thousand cuts at best. On the work side, anything "not windows" was also just not an option, and we'd code on windows and remote to unix servers as needed. Introduction of Darwin really created a space where Unix could live in personal and corporate environments.
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > Introduction of Darwin really created a space where Unix could live in personal and corporate environments. 100% this. I am a huge Linux lover but also really appreciate having the option at work to use MacOS due to the Unix userspace it provides. That being said, I would pretty much hate MacOS without the open source tooling (Nix, Homebrew, Yabai, SKHD, iTerm, etc.) I can bootstrap onto it.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I get an awful lot of mileage out of the XCode command line tools. Most of the things you need to emulate a CI pipeline locally are there, though the exceptions can occasionally be a bit of a problem.
    - heywoodlh 4y ago
      What tools do you use/find essential that get installed with XCode's command line tools? My experience with XCode's command line tools is pretty much just installing them for Homebrew. I don't think I've taken time to actually dig into the installed tools -- so I'd love to hear what tools increase your mileage! :)
    - rtpg 4y ago
      The insistence on having to install the xcode command line tools (hello "be at 99% installed for 10 hours" bug I have had over 5 different machines") is very annoyin. But I've found that brew has been a major mess as well. Nothing like coming in on a Monday and having to debug 10 coworker's machines cuz suddenly python and postgres were silently upgraded (or some random shared lib was upgraded). "Just use Docker" is also a PITA cuz of the abysmal file system performance stuff... I just want to run software! Or rather, I want my coworkers who might not be as well versed in system software to be able to have working systems. All that being said, it's undeniable that I can daily drive Linux thanks to Mac stuff existing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
uwagar 4y ago
the article refers to Apple's OS called Darwin not Darwin the naturalist.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  Considering how many evolution deniers are still around, the naturalist still hasn't quite succeeded either.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
If you're finding that a bit "wall of text", hit F12 in Firefox or CTRL-SHIFT-C in Chrome, and then pick <body> from the Inspector. Then into "element.style" put in: width: 50%; margin: auto; margin-top: 5ex; line-height: 3ex; This should make the lines about the right length to read comfortably with adequate line spacing. Most folk will find it more comfortable, and particularly if you're a bit dyslexic. Feel free to fiddle with those numbers to make it fit your eyes better.
- rswail 4y ago
  Or select "reader mode" on firefox.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    That's never really worked on mine.
bjarneh 4y ago
TLDR > The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more.
m0llusk 4y ago
Darwin was never a marketing ploy. Marketing had no idea what to do with it. The idea was to share the source for the highly usable BSD fork that Apple was working with at the time. Ultimately the effort failed because there were problems with the technology and not a lot of extra effort available. People think of Apple now and fail to remember that back at this time Apple was still an unhealthy and barely profitable corporation with a stock price just over $20. And it is worth remembering what happened with copylefted code in general. Any copylefted content that Apple published caused a bunch of mean spirited and detail oriented critics to insist on proof that all relevant source diffs had been shared. This turned out to be an ongoing support problem that could not be solved despite considerable resources being applied. The intense ongoing hostile attacks from free software advocates caused Apple to rigorously remove as must copylefted content as possible in order to stop the bleeding. Far from this being a weak marketing effort it was a engineering effort that was not strong enough to succeed and got huge amounts of negative attention from the open source community. Interesting that some of the people who put their energy into killing this effort now confidently claim it was never anything but marketing. Never underestimate the capacity of the free open source community to generate rude and mean spirited criticism based on near zero understanding of corporate operations and constraints.
- jckahn 4y ago
  This seems very plausible to me, but I’m curious if you can point to any evidence to substantiate what you’re saying?
lproven 4y ago
Google cache of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QWRpEuCKSFsJ:www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QWRpEuC...

93 points by jckahn 4y ago

Was anything really lost? You have a few engineers with hurt feelings and Apple lost the potential for some contributors to fix issues (at the expense of security by obscurity). Did the world really need another open source OS?

pipeline_peak 4y ago
It does sound like a big deal until he quietly mentions half the engineers hired we’re like 3 to 4 people lol. Darwin is a big deal in that it’s backed by one of the 5 largest tech companies. But when you look at it, it’s essentially just Mach with FreeBSD (NetBSD core utils in PowerPC days) bolted on top.

karmakaze 4y ago

> Apple's Open Source efforts with the Darwin project have been a failure. Apple failed to build a community around Darwin in the 7 years since its original release because it was not a corporate direction, but rather a marketing stunt. Culturally, Apple did not and does not understand what it means to be open source or to build a working community. WebKit[0] would be a counter-example. Maybe Darwin didn't have value beyond what Apple was doing with it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

ajross 4y ago
WebKit is LGPL only because it began life as an (internal!) fork of the KDE Konqueror codebase. And the lack of community stewardship from Apple led to it being forked again into Blink/Chromium, which has largely taken over the mantle[1] of "standard open source HTML engine". WebKit itself is hugely successful because of its use in proprietary projects basically. It's "open source" only by accident, and it seems pretty clear Apple would prefer it not be. [1] Not that Chromium is a particularly great example of an open source project, but lots of people outside Google build it, ship it, and contribute.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  I read that one of the biggest driving forces of Google forking WebKit into Blink was an increasingly large gap in the direction that the two companies wanted to take the engine, including differences on things that both parties agreed should be implemented (I seem to remember there being a difference of opinion on how to implement multi-process architecture for example), making it progressively more difficult for the two to coexist on the same codebase. Was that not true? Certainly today WebKit and Blink are significantly different engines with very different performance profiles.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    That's about right. WebKit continues to be used by Apple, and finds its way embedded into a lot of platforms like game consoles.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    This is correct, although I wonder how much they still contribute between the projects. Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions (and everything, natch), but individual contributors pop up contributing to all sorts of things. And WebKit isn’t as isolated as it might seem, just today I saw tweets about some big perf improvement contributions from the creator of Bun who’s definitely contributing for his own purposes. If I had to guess, coordination between WebKit and Blink is far less centralized than it was before, but I’d be shocked if it isn’t a going concern in places they don’t have different goals. It’d be a terrible waste of energy to have subject matter experts duplicating efforts like that.
    - sharikous 4y ago
      > Apple is notoriously secretive about employee OSS contributions Really? I see a lot of contributions from Apple engineers to the LLVM codebase
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        My understanding is that, apart from high profile involvement in certain projects (like LLVM), Apple engineers generally contribute “as individuals” without much to indicate they’re working for Apple. I could be wrong, but that’s how I’ve heard it.
lmm 4y ago
In addition to the other reply, note that Webkit only happened when the KDE developers (whose code WebKit was originally forked from) kicked up a fuss about Apple's misleading marketing of this as a successful open source engagement. Apple were originally doing bare minimum tarball dumps (which, to be clear, KDE had no real problem with in itself - that's widely accepted as a legal way to work with LGPLed code) until they got called out.

gumby 4y ago

News flash: big company only does things in its interest. When Apple was trying to escape from its near death experience (imac era) they were super enthusiastic about open standards (JPEG, MP3, iCal, et al.). When I say "super enthusiastic" I mean to the point of Jobs touting that on stage. Of course they also paid adobe and Microsoft for access to some of their very popular formats. They paid for USB and made one of the first, and as is usual for them, most strict and compliant, implementations. They were probably the first consumer 802.11 companies. As much as possible they wanted to talk to as many things as possible. As they clawed their way back those standards were still OK (and still are -- Apple is actually pretty good at supporting open standards, better than most in my experience) but they didn't care as much about going off in their own direction again, and making those their defaults.

pjmlp 4y ago
One big example was OpenGL adoption, nowadays the FOSS folks get salty with Metal, yet the pre-Jobs revival Apple was doubling down in QuickDraw 3D and QuickDraw VRML, they couldn't care less about OpenGL.
mmphosis 4y ago
> When Apple was trying to escape from its near death experience (imac era) The "imac era" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#History Steve Jobs reduced the company's large product lines immediately upon becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997 ... The company announced the iMac on May 6, 1998
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  The “era” definitely began then but definitely didn’t have much impact other than cultural until a few years later. Really it should be called the iPod era, but even that lagged a while as Apple gave up on mainstreaming FireWire.
  - gumby 4y ago
    The iMac really did keep apple from falling down the well and dying. They were busy throwing whatever they could into the fight, and (to mix metaphors) tossing overboard anything that didn’t help. This was the era of iTunes, iDVD and iEverythingElse. The iPod was at first something to plug into that nascent iEcosystem. It began a period of growth.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. I think this is more a function that Apple created the best lightweight Unix laptop at that time. Windows laptops at that time had horrible command line experience and did not play well with Unix/Linux which is what most web servers were running on. Linux laptops had horrible hardware support.

Maursault 4y ago
> Windows laptops at that time had horrible command line experience and did not play well with Unix/Linux which is what most web servers were running on. In 2006, the main reason for Linux was to fix things Microsoft broke, which upon discovery Microsoft would break again, and Linux devs would again restore functionality to Windows networks. So your first point here is somewhat true, Microsoft did not play well with Linux which was moderately successful at playing well with Microsoft. In 2006, however, most webservers did not run Linux, hardly any did, in fact. Linux took over the data center about 5 years later. In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD w/ Apache, and if not for fanaticism, this would still be true today, because there was and is absolutely nothing wrong with NetBSD that Linux fixes.
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > In 2006, most webservers were either IIS on Windows Server or, believe it or not, NetBSD. In fact, the vast majority of webservers globally, like 90% or more, ran NetBSD Do you have any sources to back this claim? I've always thought that (perhaps mistakenly) by 2005-ish Linux was already fairly dominant as a web server OS/platform. Not asking because I think you are wrong -- I just would love to read more about this and couldn't find anything more than a web server survey from 2006[1]. The survey doesn't really mention specifics about any of the Unix-like platforms other than "Linux" or "Apache" (which I assume by Linux or Apache they are grouping all non-Windows OS-es together). My interest: I'm a regular Linux user with some FreeBSD experience who finds the BSDs super interesting and their approach very admirable. [1] https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_survey.html https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web...

wahern 4y ago

Apple still regularly releases large portions of macOS. Confused about some poorly documented keychain behavior? Just look at the source, e.g., https://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-59754.80.3/OSX/libsecurity_keychain/lib/SecItem.cpp.auto.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/Security/Security-59754.... https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/Security-59754.80.3/OSX/libsecurity_keychain/lib/SecItem.cpp https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/Sec... Access to such source code is not nothing, and certainly seems more than just a marketing gimmick.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
They were always releasing code, that wasn’t the problem. They clearly never helped to make it a usable standalone oss product, at all. Just look at what the author said about breaking backwards compatibility upstream, with no regards to non Mac Darwin. It’s melodramatic to call what Apple did a “marketing stunt”, but that code on its own is pretty useless.
- skohan 4y ago
  Similar behavior is what turned me off of Swift. I still think it’s a nice language to write, but I tried to adopt it on Linux and the situation with tooling was so horrendous. Lots of things were under-supported or under-documented, and every release would break things in unexpected ways. I don’t know if it was intentional, or a lack of priority, but I got tired of having to work so hard just to get my programs to compile.
  - tempodox 4y ago
    My own anecdotal experience is that it's not that much better on Apple's platforms. Documentation may have gotten the tiniest bit better, but there's still way too much information missing. And Apple's platforms are a constantly moving target. It may turn out tomorrow that the work required to keep up is just too much. Too many incentives, IMO, to not develop for these platforms if one can avoid it.

Maursault 4y ago

How the heck did PureDarwin crawl out of those ashes 9 years later with a preview release of Darwin 9 with an X11 GUI (PureDarwin Xmas), followed three years after that by a command-line only 17.4 Beta based on Darwin 17 (corresponding to macOS High Sierra (10.13.x))? PureDarwin is quite simply impossible because Apple doesn't understand or care about OSS.

etaioinshrdlu 4y ago
I just booted the 17.4 beta in a VM. It does work, but can't really do much in its current form. Interesting nonetheless!
- Maursault 4y ago
  Wifi is not going to work, but ethernet should. To do anything at all with it, you'd need to install MacPorts and start building packages. You can make it a DAMP nearly effortlessly using MacPorts.
heywoodlh 4y ago
> PureDarwin is quite simply impossible because Apple doesn't understand or care about OSS. In an alternate reality it would be so cool if you could run MacOS apps on an open source OS. Maybe Darling[1] will one day get us past the point where you could run any MacOS app on Linux (not just simple GUI or CLI apps). That being said there aren't really any apps that I use that aren't available on Linux. But the option to would be nice! [1] https://www.darlinghq.org/ https://www.darlinghq.org/

dirtyoldmick 4y ago

Having a proper terminal was the main reason I bought a macbook pro back in 2007.

makeitdouble 4y ago

> Prior to Mac OS X, people would have been laughed out of the building for having a Mac, but now, with Mac OS X and the magic of open source, it was suddenly OK or even cool. To push a bit further, a bunch of us switched to OSX not from windows but FreeBSD or linux. Hardware support for open source OSes was abysmal and getting commercial software to run on even linux was death by thousand cuts at best. On the work side, anything "not windows" was also just not an option, and we'd code on windows and remote to unix servers as needed. Introduction of Darwin really created a space where Unix could live in personal and corporate environments.

heywoodlh 4y ago
> Introduction of Darwin really created a space where Unix could live in personal and corporate environments. 100% this. I am a huge Linux lover but also really appreciate having the option at work to use MacOS due to the Unix userspace it provides. That being said, I would pretty much hate MacOS without the open source tooling (Nix, Homebrew, Yabai, SKHD, iTerm, etc.) I can bootstrap onto it.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I get an awful lot of mileage out of the XCode command line tools. Most of the things you need to emulate a CI pipeline locally are there, though the exceptions can occasionally be a bit of a problem.
  - heywoodlh 4y ago
    What tools do you use/find essential that get installed with XCode's command line tools? My experience with XCode's command line tools is pretty much just installing them for Homebrew. I don't think I've taken time to actually dig into the installed tools -- so I'd love to hear what tools increase your mileage! :)
  - rtpg 4y ago
    The insistence on having to install the xcode command line tools (hello "be at 99% installed for 10 hours" bug I have had over 5 different machines") is very annoyin. But I've found that brew has been a major mess as well. Nothing like coming in on a Monday and having to debug 10 coworker's machines cuz suddenly python and postgres were silently upgraded (or some random shared lib was upgraded). "Just use Docker" is also a PITA cuz of the abysmal file system performance stuff... I just want to run software! Or rather, I want my coworkers who might not be as well versed in system software to be able to have working systems. All that being said, it's undeniable that I can daily drive Linux thanks to Mac stuff existing.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

uwagar 4y ago

the article refers to Apple's OS called Darwin not Darwin the naturalist.

CRConrad 4y ago
Considering how many evolution deniers are still around, the naturalist still hasn't quite succeeded either.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

If you're finding that a bit "wall of text", hit F12 in Firefox or CTRL-SHIFT-C in Chrome, and then pick <body> from the Inspector. Then into "element.style" put in: width: 50%; margin: auto; margin-top: 5ex; line-height: 3ex; This should make the lines about the right length to read comfortably with adequate line spacing. Most folk will find it more comfortable, and particularly if you're a bit dyslexic. Feel free to fiddle with those numbers to make it fit your eyes better.

rswail 4y ago
Or select "reader mode" on firefox.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  That's never really worked on mine.

bjarneh 4y ago

TLDR > The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more.

m0llusk 4y ago

Darwin was never a marketing ploy. Marketing had no idea what to do with it. The idea was to share the source for the highly usable BSD fork that Apple was working with at the time. Ultimately the effort failed because there were problems with the technology and not a lot of extra effort available. People think of Apple now and fail to remember that back at this time Apple was still an unhealthy and barely profitable corporation with a stock price just over $20. And it is worth remembering what happened with copylefted code in general. Any copylefted content that Apple published caused a bunch of mean spirited and detail oriented critics to insist on proof that all relevant source diffs had been shared. This turned out to be an ongoing support problem that could not be solved despite considerable resources being applied. The intense ongoing hostile attacks from free software advocates caused Apple to rigorously remove as must copylefted content as possible in order to stop the bleeding. Far from this being a weak marketing effort it was a engineering effort that was not strong enough to succeed and got huge amounts of negative attention from the open source community. Interesting that some of the people who put their energy into killing this effort now confidently claim it was never anything but marketing. Never underestimate the capacity of the free open source community to generate rude and mean spirited criticism based on near zero understanding of corporate operations and constraints.

jckahn 4y ago
This seems very plausible to me, but I’m curious if you can point to any evidence to substantiate what you’re saying?

lproven 4y ago

Google cache of the page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QWRpEuCKSFsJ:www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QWRpEuC...