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by TGRush 1288 days ago
Technially, the Darwin Kernel it uses is OSS

https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
1 comments
EnigmaCurry 1288 days ago
Can you actually recompile your kernel on Mac? And its functional?

I'll bet this isn't even the source code Apple uses, but rather they have a private fork with extra patches (similar to how Microsoft publishes OSS VS Code, but then uses their own proprietary version for releases).

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umanwizard 1288 days ago
You can, or at least could 5 years ago or so (and I bet you still could now).

However, it involved finding some random blog post on how to do it, and then even once I got it up and running there were some issues like the fans being pegged at 100%. Still, it was mostly functional.

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josephg 1288 days ago
I can speak to that via scuttlebutt from ex-apple friends. Apparently the intel power management code running in macos includes proprietary code from intel that they weren't comfortable opensourcing, for weird reasons.
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xvilka 1287 days ago
There was an attempt to make a complete FOSS OS on top of that - PureDarwin[1][2]. It looks dead now though.

[1] http://www.puredarwin.org/

[2] https://github.com/puredarwin

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my123 1288 days ago
Yes. However, many kernel modules needed to boot on a modern macOS machine are proprietary.
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AtlasBarfed 1288 days ago
If an os is partially oss but functionally closed, what do you call that?

If I run windows with apache web server, is windows now open source?

rMS is a zealot, but it doesn't mean he's wrong...

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