Ask HN: What would happen if Apple open-sourced OS X? What are the security/market/competitors implications? Upsides and downsides in your opinion. Would you like to see it? etc etc |
Ask HN: What would happen if Apple open-sourced OS X? What are the security/market/competitors implications? Upsides and downsides in your opinion. Would you like to see it? etc etc |
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).
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).
In other words: don't hold your breath.
There is one implication that Apple is currently rewriting kernel level that will need a huge effort and was discussed in HN.
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.