OpenDarwin Shutting Down
OpenDarwin was originally created with the goal of providing a development environment for building and developing Mac OS X sources as well as developing a standalone Darwin OS derivative. OpenDarwin was meant to be a development community and a proving ground for fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin, which could be picked up by Apple for inclusion in the canonical sources. OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in 4 years of operation, and moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down.
Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects. The original notions of developing the Mac OS X and Darwin sources has not panned out. Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this. Administering a system to host other people’s projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for and have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark.
Project admins for all active projects have been notified, and we will be working with them to provide as seamless a transition to their new homes as possible. We don’t want to boot anyone off, we will be operating the machines as usual for several months, until everyone has had a chance to move elsewhere.
We will continue to provide email and dns redirection after the machines go dark. We’ll be looking at what other redirection services are needed and can be provided after hosting has ceased.
The OpenDarwin team would like to thank everyone who did contribute to the project, and our apologies to active, loyal projects that have to move.
Thanks,
– OpenDarwin Core Team and Administrators
You can follow the thread discussing this announcement, off-topic rants and all.
The project has been drifting for awhile: to be honest, I lost sight of the buildable kernel project some time ago. The Ports system seem to be getting the most traction and seemed like the main focus. The Apple employees who are on the mailing lists are silent on this, for one reason or another.
I note that the last announcement of a source distribution is more than 2 years old. There have been more recent ones, I think see (the 8.x releases, corresponding to X.4.x) but you wouldn’t know it from here.