[tech] Anybody with free traffic?

[David Cake]

>If anyone is bored and has free traffic, you might
>consider downloading Darwin from Apple. It appears to
>be a developer release of MacOS X and looks quite cool.
>
>Its a partially Open Source project which would mean
>the Mac had a reason to exist in terms of coding - UCCans
>could then contribute to the project.
>
	Darwin is open sourced Mach and BSD layers of OS X, a lot of it is
basically from one of the BSD distribs (they are moving towards
compatibility with FreeBSD as much as possible), but a lot is not. The real
value IMO is not so much in Darwin itself (do we need another BSD variant
OS distrib out there?) but that Darwin means with OS X you will be able to
hack around at low levels a lot while still having a good commercial OS
with an Apple GUI, etc. which appeals to me a lot (I love unix but hate X).
	They have not opensourced the object libraries, though, which are
IMO the coolest bit of MacOS X, or the graphics libraries.
	I would warn everyone that the driver model is set to change
significantly with the next release, so if you want to do Darwin stuff,
bear that in mind. Driver support is currently pretty minimal - no serial,
for example. All indications are that the new driver model will be pretty
cool (I attended a session on it at WWDC, and it sounded good), but its
late.

	Cheers
		David