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Ask HN: What would happen if Apple open-sourced OS X?

4 pointsby enenover 8 years ago
What are the security/market/competitors implications? Upsides and downsides in your opinion. Would you like to see it? etc etc

5 comments

enkiv2over 8 years ago
Not much would happen. Big chunks of what constitutes OS X is already open source. Nobody runs GNU&#x2F;Darwin the same way nobody runs Plan 9.<p>Apple&#x27;s market is primarily geared towards people who aren&#x27;t interested in the tech and are paying for the logo. After all, anybody who wants an OS X equivalent system who knows what they&#x27;re doing can buy a bog-standard PC and run some free unix on it with GNUStep. So, the licensing for Apple products doesn&#x27;t matter because Apple&#x27;s market excludes anybody who cares too much about licensing (or anything other than branding).
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dhagzover 8 years ago
The parts of OSX I&#x27;d like to see open-sourced are exactly the parts Apple will never open up. I&#x27;d love for their desktop environment to be open-source - if I could have that running on top of, say, Arch, I&#x27;d be incredibly happy. But the desktop environment is one of the big things Apple uses to sell their computers, and it wouldn&#x27;t make sense to give it away like that.
allenbrunsonover 8 years ago
From Apple&#x27;s perspective, the whole point of the work they put into macOS is to add value to macs, the selling of which is their bread and butter. (or used to be ... i guess now it&#x27;s mostly selling iPhones.) If they were to open-source it, it would be quickly modified to run on bog-standard PCs, removing Apple&#x27;s motivation to put any more effort into it.<p>In other words: don&#x27;t hold your breath.
proyb2over 8 years ago
Apple did open source Darwin years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Darwin_%28operating_system%29" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Darwin_%28operating_system%29</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puredarwin.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.puredarwin.org&#x2F;</a><p>There is one implication that Apple is currently rewriting kernel level that will need a huge effort and was discussed in HN.
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bitshepherdover 8 years ago
Being that chunks of it are already available via <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.apple.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.apple.com&#x2F;</a> not much would happen.<p>The NextBSD project was consuming some of the open sourced bits and bolting them onto a FreeBSD fork, but I&#x27;m not sure where that project has left off.