FreeBSD and MacOS

[Justin Walker]

On Jul 1, 2004, at 5:28, Eitarou Kamo wrote:

> Hi Q and all,
>
> Q wrote:
>
>>
>> The portions of the FreeBSD kernel that Apple have adopted can be 
>> found as part of the XNU project (the darwin kernel) from Apple's 
>> Opensource website
>> http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/
>> The CVS tags should still be intact on the files in question.
>>
> Is the darwin entirely open source?

Darwin, as the underpinnings for Mac OS X, is entirely open source, in 
the sense that you can build a running Darwin system from the 
open-source code available from Apple.  You can't completely replace 
corresponding components in Mac OS X with code from the Darwin code 
base and have a working system (some frameworks/libraries are only 
partially open source).

Some components of the kernel are not open-source, but they are not 
needed to build a Darwin system, or to build a kernel that can replace 
the one you have on a running Mac OS X system.  These components are 
loadable kernel modules, and as such, will load into a rebuilt kernel 
of the same version level.

Hope that isn't too confusing.

Regards,

Justin

--
Justin C. Walker, Curmudgeon-At-Large  *
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