Apple closes down OS X ???

I am not sure whether this is just rumour or not, but I read the following on InfoWorld.

Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple's OS X is now a proprietary operating system.

Mac developers and power users no longer have the freedom to alter, rebuild, and replace the OS X kernel from source code. Stripped of openness, it no longer possesses the quality that elevated Linux to its status as the second most popular commercial OS.

What is that supposed to mean? A way to address piracy! There are many other ways to address such issues, as many other companies practices. After all the OS is based on Darwin open source Mach/Unix core …. is this allowed by the license?

Though I am not an OS X user, as of today at least, because I was thinking of getting me one as they are much better priced now compared to the premium Apple used to charge when they had PowerPC based platforms, I am now getting inclined more towards not getting me a Mac anymore. And being frank I really came to like their new MacBook, especially the black version.

If OS X will become proprietory OS = that's for sure no "go" for me.

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Comment by Seth on May 19, 2006

I think what they are thinking is that since it’s able to run on Intel chips that people would port it over to x86 hardware and since Apple is really just a hardware company that is bad for business. Besides I think if OS X were easily ported to x86 machines then piracy would skyrocket. With Windows, Microsoft has a death grip on big companies that would get sued into bankrupcy if they had illegal copies of Windows on their machines. OS X however is used by a lot of college kids and musicians who typically don’t have the cash to fork over for a new Mac so buying a cheaper PC and installing a free copy of OS X is a cheap solution for them. Besides, this just helps the push for Linux. When desktops are as good and installs are as easy as they are on Mac and Windows machines I think it will become the leader. If you described Linux to most people they would agree it was better but try teaching your Grandma to check her dmesg output or re compiling the kernel to include XFS support :).

Comment by Olivier on May 19, 2006

This is a joke… OS X is already proprietary. Check the Wikipedia entry…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X
The core (Darwin) is open but the rest is closed source and proprietary. Linux and Mac OSX are related but not close brothers…

Comment by E@zyVG on May 23, 2006

In the Fed-Talk mailing list, Ernest Prabhakar (Apple’s product manager for Open Source & Open Standards) denies that Apple is going to close the Darwin kernel for x86: “Just to be clear, Tom Yager was speculating about why we have - so far - not released the source code of the kernel for Intel-based Macintoshes. We continue to release all the Darwin sources for our PowerPC systems, and so far have released all the non-kernel Darwin sources for Intel. Nothing has been announced, so he (and everyone else) certainly has the right to speculate. But please don’t confuse ’speculation’ with ‘fact’.”