Apple publishes open-source code for OS X El Capitan

Apple has officially released the open-source components behind OS X El Capitan, making good on the licensing requirements of the code.

Numerous file directories for El Capitan were added to the company's open-source site overnight. Together the components help form Darwin, a Unix-based OS that OS X's proprietary technology sits on top of. No installer is included however, meaning that the code is mainly of interest for people wanting to see how Apple has forked the software.

El Capitan originally shipped on Sept. 30. Critics have sometimes complained that Apple can be slow to publish open-source code, even though licenses demand that those parts be freely shared.

The company also shares some of the code in iOS, but most components are privately developed or licensed — there are just six open-source downloads listed for iOS 9.

Earlier on Tuesday Apple released OS X 10.11.2, a maintenance update for El Capitan. The software fixes problems with wireless connectivity, as well as things like importing iPhone photos via USB.

9 Comments

fallenjt 4056 comments · 13 Years

About 8 years ago

Will this be a good decision? Damn, I don't know.

ksec 1502 comments · 18 Years

fallenjt said:

Will this be a good decision? Damn, I don't know.

Apple had always had those Open Source, it is just they are used to post the Open Source Code months later after release.

felix01 296 comments · 17 Years

I wonder why Apple didn't migrate this over to GitHub (which is where they put Swift)?

misa 827 comments · 13 Years

ksec said:

fallenjt said:

Will this be a good decision? Damn, I don't know.

Apple had always had those Open Source, it is just they are used to post the Open Source Code months later after release.

Considering that the only people who benefit from the Open Source Darwin core are the Hackintosh people. I wouldn't fault them too much for it. It's one thing to release an complete OS that works on any piece of x86-64 kit, it's another to just release the parts that benefit almost nobody.

It's like forks for OpenOffice, OpenSSL and MySQL. It did absolutely no good to fork them, but they were forked for political agenda reasons, not functionality reasons.

Essentially, there is no point to using the Darwin "OS" over something like FreeBSD or Linux because without the rest of the Mac OS X parts it's like having a car with none of the parts that make it road-worthy.

wizard69 13358 comments · 21 Years

fallenjt said:

Will this be a good decision? Damn, I don't know.

It isn't a question of good or bad, it is a requirement if they use the code. The whining from the open source community is often the result of Apples slow release schedules of such software. There is probably an argument to be made though that releasing software before you are done with it doesn't make sense either. As long as it eventually gets released we are all good.