Naysayers

There were many who felt that Apple was never going to open up XNU again.

There were those who decided it was time to close down OpenDarwin, and that it wasn’t worth waiting for announcements during WWDC (which I’ve always felt was really weird, and I wasn’t alone with that notion).

All in all, a fair share of developers had completely lost faith in the Darwin project.

Maybe Apple just proved them all wrong. Mac OS Forge has WordPress, Subversion and Trac and hosts five interesting projects.

Whether interaction with Apple’s engineers will finally improve has yet to be seen. But if the WebKit site opened last year wasn’t proof enough that Apple “really means it” about open source, maybe Mac OS Forge finally is.

Apparently the “XNU on Intel has certain closed-source third-party components that can’t be released, hence the delay” theory was dead-on. Those were now moved into kernel extensions, which resolves the issue of having XNU itself open-source.

Sometimes you gotta have a little more faith in people.