Garry wrote:
Mac OS X is basically BSD that's been appleised (serious vendor lock-in),
they do give a little back to BSDs, but have made sure that BSDs can't get
much off of them, but they can get a lot out of BSD.
Also, Windows uses (or used to use) a BSD stack for networking for
instance.
The Darwin core is a hybrid of Mach/BSD (xnu). The Darwin core is open
source, and you can download the open source tools they use (and in
cases such as CUPS, own and develop) from
http://www.apple.com/opensource/ or http://www.opensource.apple.com/. To
say they have given nothing back is untrue, they make their changes
available which is not required, but that doesn't mean they're actually
being used by the community.
Their graphical system on top of Darwin is proprietary, but it is
possible to build Darwin using the source code provided by Apple. There
is only vendor lock in if you choose to use applications which only work
in their graphical environment, but for most things that would cause
vendor lock-in, they are either open source or available on multiple
platforms.
It's interesting you mention how Apple doesn't give back, as it has also
been the case with Linux and related projects borrowing code from BSD
and then "not giving back" by proving changes under an incompatible
license. This has been discussed at length on the lists of some BSD
project with an outspoken leader...
Also, Linux and GPL software is not immune from the "Apple treatment".
Android uses the Dalvik VM for all of the software, and Dalvik is under
the Apache license which allows for proprietary uses. You should notice
this is definitely used to the fullest by cell phone vendors as they
release source code for the kernel only. How is it Apple releases more
code than is available for your typical Android device?
This does not mean to say that I have a problem with the quality of the code
in BSD, I just feel that the license is counter productive.
The "productive" hope is that good code will be used, and people will
not write bad code instead due to overly restrictive licenses preventing
them from using said good code.
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