[Infowarrior] - Apple closes down OS X

[Richard Forno]

Apple closes down OS X
Client kernel has gone proprietary, but it¹s not too late to set things
right
http://ww6.infoworld.com/products/print_friendly.jsp?link=/article/06/05/17/
78300_21OPcurve_1.html

By Tom Yager

May 17, 2006

Thanks to pirates, or rather the fear of them, the Intel edition of Apple¹s
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.

The Darwin open source Mach/Unix core shared by OS X Tiger client and OS X
Tiger Server remains completely open for PowerPC Macs. If you have a G3, G4,
or G5 Mac, you can hack your own Darwin kernel and use it to boot OS X. But
if you have an Intel-based Mac desktop or notebook, your kernel and device
drivers are inviolable. Apple still publishes the source code for OS X¹s
commands and utilities and laudably goes several extra miles by open
sourcing internally developed technologies such as QuickTime Streaming
Server and Bonjour zero-config networking. The source code required to build
a customized OS X kernel, however, is gone. Apple says that the state of an
OS X-compatible open source x86 Darwin kernel is ³in flux.²

Apple has only shipped client systems, the users of which care least about
openness. Soon, though, Apple will break out Intel variants of the kinds of
machines that InfoWorld readers buy and on which I depend; namely, servers
and workstations. I hope that Apple¹s flux settles into a strategy that
favors demanding users and developers.

Apple¹s retreat to a proprietary kernel means that all users must accept a
fixed level of performance. The default OS X kernels are built for broad
compatibility rather than breakneck speed and throughput. That doesn¹t
matter at present, because all Intel Macs are built on the same Core
Duo/Core Solo 32-bit architecture. But Apple¹s workstation and server will
be built using next-generation 64-bit x86 CPUs. The chipset, the bus, the
memory, almost everything about the high-end machines will be much advanced
over iMac and MacBook Pro. Intel¹s road map plots a rapid course to ever
higher performance. Macs will inherit the benefits of Core
Microarchitecture¹s evolution, but OS X is limited in the degree to which it
can exploit specific new features without creating branch after branch of OS
code to handle each tweak to the architecture.

Users in demanding fields such as biosciences or meteorology do hack OS
kernels to slim them down, alter the balance between throughput and
computing, and to open them to the resources of a massive grid. The
availability of Intel¹s top-shelf compilers, debuggers, libraries, and
profilers create unprecedented opportunities to optimize OS X for specific
applications.

Even if I don¹t need to hack the kernel, knowing that I can affords me a
level of self-sufficiency and insulation from vendors¹ whims that fixed
system software, such as Windows¹, does not.

Apple is in the unique position of losing hardware sales to software
pirates. It faces the risk of cloned Macs being distributed in foreign
markets where intellectual property protection is weak. I empathize. But
there are ways to address the piracy issue without stripping the critical
and defining quality of openness from OS X. That¹s a subject addressed in my
Enterprise Mac blog.

I hope it¹s discussed at Apple so that OS X¹s openness can be pulled from
its state of flux and restored to the state that OS X¹s most demanding users
expect and deserve.