>but we're not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem
What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'?
The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997
>but we're not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem
What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'?
The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997
The Tn chip.
Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.
Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.
It seems so weird that the M series are really SOCs and not just CPUs. I also don't really want a home computer to have coprocessors just for machine learning...
At least they always allow installing your own arbitrary OS.
a lot of the kernel extensions are closed source proprietary. The core is still open but a lot of what makes modern Mac, Mac, are those kexts.
how has that changed over the past 20 years? the proprietary parts of Mac OS X and now macOS have been proprietary from the beginning
There used to be a bootable Darwin instance that Apple published, which on paper would've made things a bit easier, but they stopped publishing it a while ago. It never resulted in any serious OS with a UI however.
There was a community around Darwin for a while, and people released Darwin distros that ran X11 and a variety of ported Unix software. You’re right that it never really amounted to anything serious though. Within Apple, open sourcing Darwin seems to mainly have been a marketing ploy to get Unix/Linux people interested in Mac OS X by tying it to the hype around the open source movement. There’s a good article with more information here: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html
The premise of that article is way off base. Darwin didn't fail, because the point wasn't to create a robust open source operating system along the lines of Linux. Apple got everything they needed from the OSS community while providing no more than they were required to. Apple got a bunch of tools, utilities, shells, etc as well as a view that this was a Real UNIX Operating System (TM) (they even got it certified) and that inarguably sold millions of machines
Their goal was never to build a community around Darwin or get a bunch of people outside the company using Darwin sans Mac OS X's proprietary bits, or to get a bunch of people outside the company contributing to Darwin
You are describing the premise of the article.
> The problem was Darwin was a marketing ploy, and nothing more. Marketing thought that by throwing some source files over the wall, they could increase their market share and revenue. And they were right. You go to almost any technical conference these days, and there is an astonishing number of Mac laptops in the crowd. 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. Managerially and culturally, Apple had no intention of becoming involved with any community outside its own walls. There were some well intentioned engineers and even a few low level managers that were duped by their own marketing department, and that was all. These people had given substantial amounts of their free time under the illusion they were doing something Right, something Good, but in the end were simply used by their own company's marketing department.
Except the premise is that it was a failure. It wasn't, it accomplished exactly what they set out to do
By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.
Correct, but to dismiss the NeXT contributions from BSD into modern mac and Darwin would be to dismiss Darwin entirely. Macintosh from the System7 days was a dramatically different beast.
I think the point is that Darwin wasn’t really a serious attempt to move Apple toward being an open source company.
Open source software was used for the basis of macOS for Apple’s convenience, not because Apple intended to publish very much open source software.
BSD has a convenient license for these purposes and it’s why proprietary commercial products like the PlayStation 5 choose to use it.