Editorial  

Apple in OpenSourceLand

Over a year ago, I was lying under a tree quite bored of reading through those Mac OS error code definitions. "In my world, I was saying, everything would be open sourced and it would be a great community of ..." Just then a little aqua rabbit jumped pass me saying "I'm not beta anymore! I'm not beta anymore!" Can you imagine my astonishment? Anyway I jumped in the hole where he had disapeared and I heard rumors (with a ghostly voice) : FreeBSD, GNU, Linux. I had heard quite a bit about GNU/Linux before but that seemed a big step for someone like me who came to Mac doing mostly music. But now I was nearing perfect happiness : Mac on a unix open source system. So after many hours of unbelievable fun playing with the Dock, I started trying to find the console and looking around the web for some way to start. Scrambling through the Utilities folder, I felt the ground give way and I have been falling since then.

The first serious thing I found was OSXFAQ with a tutorial of installing X11 and WindowMaker on Mac OS X (does not seem to be available anymore). That is how I started to figure out that open source software on Mac was really a reality and that it was going to be really complicated. Some poeple had realised the same but were smarter than me. I soon discovered Gnu-Darwin and Fink. Both projects focus on the same goal : having open source software on Mac OS X. These two projects really started me up and I have been using their tools since then. And where do you land once you get started ? I don't know, I'm still falling. But I came across many many poeple on various mailing lists and everybody is out there to help each other, and that is what open source is all about. A great group effort towards freedom ! (you can add trumpets here if you want) It is hard to realise how important that is. Just try to imagine that you could get MS Explorer for free (I know you already can) and modify it at will to make it run on linux and add some functionnalities of your own. Imagine the same for Office, it is called OpenOffice and is not related in any way to Microsoft of course and it is available for your Mac. That is what software freedom is all about.

There are now many projects bringing open source to Mac OS X. The main ideas are generally getting the package to compile, make sure other needed packages are present and having binaries (compiled packages) integrated in the process. Those I know at least a bit of :

• darwinfiles : a (very) new project
• darwinports : a completely new project that works for the moment only with 10.2 and that promises to be very good
• darwin ports : a port of the freebsd port system
• debian-darwin : a (very) new port of the debian tools
• fink : a port of the debian tools with very good dependency checking, over 1400 packages including KDE (not a small achievement) and some sound support through a heavily patched esound
• gnu-darwin : a port of the freebsd port system and binary tools, over 4000 packages and full support for the x86 version of Darwin
• netbsd : their own OSX version, requires a UFS file system but they have a clever workaround using a disk image
• osxgnu : based on Apple's Install application
• openpackages : a project that aims to build a common system for all BSD variants. They have adopted opendarwin's darwinports model not very long after its release.

Now does there need to be so many? The answer is another question : What do you need and how eager are you to fall indefinitely?

Yves de Champlain