[Discuss] our friend the nsa

[Richard Pieri]

john saylor wrote:
> as i understand it, darwin is a fork of freebsd. apple has some non-open
> stuff in there too.

You misunderstand it. The kernel, XNU, is FreeBSD + Mach, both open 
source. The userland is main line FreeBSD. Apple contributes code 
changes upstream to FreeBSD and Mach. See:

http://www.opensource.apple.com/

There are some binary blob drivers but that's no different than binary 
blob drivers commonly added to Linux kernels by Ubuntu, Red Hat, et.al.

Aqua, the graphical layer, is proprietary but it isn't part of Darwin.


markw at mohawksoft.com wrote:
 > "darwin" is pretty dead. Apple stopped providing updates a long time
 > ago.

Incorrect, Mark. See link above which includes the full Darwin source 
trees from the very first version (10.0.0) of OS X all the way up to 
almost current (10.8.4). Almost because 10.8.5 was just released this 
week and the source code hasn't yet made its way over.

-- 
Rich P.