distribution-macOS VS macos

Every Christmas break I always hope I'll have the emotional energy to dig back into https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin#readme and see if I can get it to boot, even on VirtualBox, let alone some hackintosh friendly hardware like OP did

I am super, super cognizant that the devil's in the proverbial details, but they sure do seem to publish a lot of macOS into the open <https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...> so my interest is to map out the parts that are missing

I'm also aware that Darling exists (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38423469 ) but if it's anything like Wine -- no, thank you. The only reason Wine (and their CrossOver friends) are required to exist is because there's no suitable open source release of Windows, so emulating the bugs is glucose cheaper. I had high hopes for ReactOS when I was in college, but I think they're just pushing that rock uphill (although I am super glad the project exists)

Having said all of that, don't overlook that even if I snapped my fingers and had a PureDarwin built 14.3 .iso this very second, the supply chain for x86_64 applications for any such OS is likely going the way of the dodo, since it won't be in a vendor's best interest to dedicate resources to building releases for what they assume is a dead platform

To be fair, linking to the Releases page when there are no release notes are all here was completely useless for browsing. Linking directly to the tag on the Git repo would make it obvious that submodules are being used and allows browsing directly:

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

I doubt most readers on HN are going to clone this locally and I also doubt anyone expects a release archive to contain Git submodules. This isn't to fault the repo authors, since we have to note that there isn't an actual "GitHub Release" here, it's just the automatic archive from GitHub for a certain tag.

Vendors have been selling you open-source software since the '80s. Here's macOS 13.2's open-source components. Darwin isn't really a thing any more, but around half of what Apple doesn't distribute any more is open source as well.

Darwin is open source. Here's the repo for their kernel: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/main. The userspace stuff can be found here: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

> ...even though they are technically in violation of the GPL by modifying and shipping bash binaries without full source - it is missing rootless.h (not the X11 file)

They're not.

They've covered this in two main ways:

1) By listing all their source code on https://opensource.apple.com/ (which links to their GitHub with all the source code)

2) By offering a complete machine-readable copy of the source code upon request as per GPLv2 (3)(b). This offer is made both in the license agreement[0] you agree to when booting up your Mac for the first time, updating it, etc., as well as in an Acknowledgements.rtf[1] file that is located on your drive at multiple locations (e.g., /Library/Documentation) and linked to from within certain apps (e.g., about section, acknowledgment section under Help, EULA agreement prompt, etc.).

That covers the bash part. rootless.h isn't part of bash and is part of libSystem.dylib, so that would fall under the OS exception in GPLv2[2]:

> However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

0: https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSSonoma.pdf (see §15)

1: https://opensource.apple.com/source/files/files-553/Library/...

2: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html

What do you mean by "upstream" in this context? https://github.com/apple-open-source/macos ? Something else?

The XNU kernel has been open source for a very long time.

https://opensource.apple.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

Note that this is not the full operating system/windowing system, it's just the kernel.

Yeah, definitely not a fan of the phoning home part. But let’s not be melodramatic. https://github.com/apple-open-source/macos