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 wo

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.