OSDev.org

As a Humble Apple fan, I felt excited to hear about the XNU is open source, yet noone develops with it?

Is there a clause where by Apple will, as they call it ; "Bust your @$$" , if you use it in any work outside of OSX?

-An OS powered by MACH and FreeBSD implementations.... it's not really a Linux beater, but it is different. and difference alone, sometimes is good.
And the IPC messaging system is kickass.

Aren't only the freebsd based parts open source, with closed source blobs? If that is the case it would severely limit porting and your ability to expand on it...

Hmm...
You also get access to libkernel and iokit...

it states that you will be able to "Make an bootable Kernel" - but how functional it is....

here's the sources : http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/ ... 1456.1.26/

Plus, would't it be worth implementing all of the close source component? - apple will still sue your @$$ if you did....


plus, what are the guys at voodoo using? -surely they must have the code for Mach?

I would be sure to read all licenses carefully...

There are a few projects that use the XNU kernel, many of the open source userland components are also ported to other systems occasionally.. for the longest time the tarballs on those pages required an Apple account, fortunately that is no longer the case.

The few projects using the kernel are usually modifying it for non-Apple branded systems, i.e: supporting additional hardware, running on unsupported CPU's (..both newer and older, even AMD).

With the exception of a few drivers, I think the kernel is complete (..and you can load the kernel modules from an OS X system).

It hasn't been touched in years, but PureDarwin is just the kernel/userland without Apple's GUI. The original attempt as such a system was OpenDarwin, but that's now defunct.

The Apple source license is.. verbose.. but as berkus said, it's easier to understand then the GPL and it is permissive (..like BSD).

OSx86 is one of those projects , it's what i'm running right now
Looks like I've got a lot of source code to play with

berkus wrote: IANAL, so just read the license carefully, it is well-written (unlike GPL).

By the way, I can't but agree with this. GPL license is really hard to understand)

Note that the license covering many parts of Darwin (including XNU) is APSL with extra terms. These extra terms explicitly prohibit its use its use for many aditional purposes (e.g. running OS X on non-Mac platforms), hence making the license terms (in many people's opinions, e.g. Debian's, non-free)