
Ask HN: What would happen if Apple open-sourced OS X? - enen
What are the security&#x2F;market&#x2F;competitors implications? Upsides and downsides in your opinion. Would you like to see it? etc etc
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enkiv2
Not much would happen. Big chunks of what constitutes OS X is already open
source. Nobody runs GNU/Darwin the same way nobody runs Plan 9.

Apple's market is primarily geared towards people who aren't interested in the
tech and are paying for the logo. After all, anybody who wants an OS X
equivalent system who knows what they're doing can buy a bog-standard PC and
run some free unix on it with GNUStep. So, the licensing for Apple products
doesn't matter because Apple's market excludes anybody who cares too much
about licensing (or anything other than branding).

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Jtsummers
GNUStep is not a drop in replacement for OS X. Among other things, every
framework isn't available. It's also only API compatible (or striving for)
with OpenStep, which is, now, a subset of what OS X provides. It's not binary
compatible, so at a minimum your OS X apps need a recompile. More likely, they
need porting. They also went with a different look and feel than what OS X
has.

Etoile attempted to provide something closer to the OS X experience, but there
seems to have been very little movement recently, and it had its own ideas
(some pretty interesting ones, actually).

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dhagz
The parts of OSX I'd like to see open-sourced are exactly the parts Apple will
never open up. I'd love for their desktop environment to be open-source - if I
could have that running on top of, say, Arch, I'd be incredibly happy. But the
desktop environment is one of the big things Apple uses to sell their
computers, and it wouldn't make sense to give it away like that.

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allenbrunson
From Apple's perspective, the whole point of the work they put into macOS is
to add value to macs, the selling of which is their bread and butter. (or used
to be ... i guess now it's mostly selling iPhones.) If they were to open-
source it, it would be quickly modified to run on bog-standard PCs, removing
Apple's motivation to put any more effort into it.

In other words: don't hold your breath.

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proyb2
Apple did open source Darwin years ago:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29)
[http://www.puredarwin.org/](http://www.puredarwin.org/)

There is one implication that Apple is currently rewriting kernel level that
will need a huge effort and was discussed in HN.

~~~
sigjuice
Do you have a link to this HN discussion? Thanks!

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bitshepherd
Being that chunks of it are already available via
[https://opensource.apple.com/](https://opensource.apple.com/) not much would
happen.

The NextBSD project was consuming some of the open sourced bits and bolting
them onto a FreeBSD fork, but I'm not sure where that project has left off.

