This morning I saw this editorial by Tom Yager in InfoWorld. He claims that Apple’s OS X is now a “closed proprietary operating system” because Apple hasn’t released the kernel for Darwin on x86 (specifically, xnu). I have several reactions to his statements. Note that I generally think Tom Yager is a good journalist and presents well reasoned articles.
Apple has not made any specific announcement to my knowledge that the kernel source will not be available. If you have followed Darwin (and not many people honestly do), you would know that there have been significant delays in Apple pushing code to the Darwin tree. I believe this is completely understandable as they obviously ship first and get the code cleaned up for release after. Is this a delay or really a policy change? Without some sort of statement by Apple, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt.
Even if this is true, does this really make OS X a “closed proprietary operating system”? I’ve seen far more source code for OS X than Windows. It’s not that closed. All the major services we rely on in OS X are open. Most in fact is from well known projects.
I do hope that this is not a change in Apple’s policy. It is indeed a good thing to have the kernel as well as the rest of the core OS available. But I don’t think it makes me think of OS X that differently than before.
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