[nycbug-talk] Good Citizen?

[Bob Ippolito]

On Nov 7, 2004, at 20:26, Pastor Mac wrote:

> I'm thinking of writing a piece for a buddy of mine that runs a 
> Mac-centric website (for the morbidly curious see <www.lowendmac.com>) 
> about the new 5.3 release.  Specifically, I'd like to get some 
> perspective on how much cross pollination is ongoing between the BSD 
> community and Darwin development.  I don't want to trigger a flame 
> fest but I'm interested in hearing if Apple is simply sucking up other 
> people's work or if Apple's developers are truly opening up and 
> participating in the open source community.

It definitely goes both ways, but I would have to say that Apple 
definitely generates more open source code than they borrow these days. 
  They're also getting a bit better about their release schedule: beta 
Darwin 8 sources have been available since WWDC, and the latest Darwin 
7.6 (10.3.6) sources are already available.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any push to integrate some of Apple's 
most important open source contributions into the BSDs, such as IOKit, 
CoreFoundation, etc.  In some cases there is similar but much less 
significant work such as GEOM going on, but there is really no 
comparison between GEOM and IOKit.

-bob