We’ve seen a few examples of vendor-backed open source efforts that were shut down, abandoned, or curtailed. Add to this list Apple Computer with its Darwin BSD core for Mac OS X. Tom Yager at InfoWorld published a piece today entitled “Apple closes down OS X“. This issue has been discussed for several months now. In mid-February, Dave Schroeder posted to the MacEnterprise listing mail regarding the stark differences between the PowerPC and Intel Darwin Source Code lists. Rob Braun, a former Apple employee posted “A Brief History of Apple’s Open Source Efforts” which gives a quick overview of the changes from the perspective of a contributor.

By limiting the Darwin project for Intel, Apple makes it a bit more difficult for people to build a robust, hardware-independent, community-hack release of Mac OS X for Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. As Tom says, Apple has hardware sales on the line here, and this may be reason enough to pull the plug on this project.

I’d prefer to see Darwin live on, in full. However, the project hasn’t caught on, and there’s substantially more community innovation going on in Linux today, with efforts like Ubuntu. It’s not like Apple is intending to “save BSD” or anything. Apple’s strategy isn’t dependent upon openness. The company has been closed in so many ways for so long now, and it actually seems to be working!

PS: I have been a Mac user for 15 years, and have no problem pointing out Apple’s mistakes. A fan, but not a fanatic.