[besson3c]

A real shame:

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 offline.

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 offline. 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.

OpenDarwin hosted some projects such as Darwinports and XPostFacto.

I'm sure that these projects will find a new home, but it is a real shame that Apple's open source strategy has always sucked so much that Darwin has become virtually irrelevant. It would have been great for some OSS projects to have been rolled into OS X, and for some projects to be born that would allow system-level alterations to OS X which would only be possible if it were easier to get source from Apple.

I have no clue what the wisdom has been in locking down so much of the underlying Unix components of OS X. Microsoft would gain nothing from copying such low level stuff since Windows is so fundamentally different.

[Pendergast]

Personally, I am a fink guy.