I was having a debate with a friend who is a MacOSX user about the contributions that Apple have offered to the open source community. Me being a Linux/Windows user couldn't think of a high profile (at least) example of Apple contributing to the Open Source community.

DOes anyone know of any examples of Apple's contributions?

If not is it not at the least ungratefull of Apple to use the Apache Web Server and the X11 system in their products without directly giving something back to the community.


My other question is slightly more trivial,
I logged into the same friends Super User account using the 'su' command in a terminal window using MacOS and changed to the top level directory. Here I found that all his document folders/files (e.g. Pictures, Videos) were sitting directly alongside system directories (/etc/, /bin/, etc).
Upon looking into some of the system directories I realised that there was a substantial lack of executables, librariess etc that are usually present in a Unix based system.

My question is does MacOS store the system files (such as the X11 executable which I assume should exist somewere in the system heirarchy) in another locatrion? Or are they by some means hidden?

If they are hidden it struck me as strange that a users documents would be side by side with the system directories.

Thanks for your time...Id Apprechiate replies if possible

Stephen

Oh man.

This reminds me of something I forgot. Didn't Apple just open source a service utility with their Tiger release? It had something to do with...

Ok. It just came back to me after 10 minutes of searching. They open sourced "launchd" which is their replacement for cron - or was it xinetd?

Yep, from what I've read - but I'm no expert - launchd sounds pretty good.

The core of the OS, darwin, is also, open sourced - there's even an x86 version :wink: - you can read about it and download it on the Apple Developer's Site.

With regard to the structure of the file system, it's completely different in OS X to the majority of other Unix based systems. Not only that but is uses the NeXT based package system for most of the Mac OS X applications. For example, you'll find the Mail program acutally runs from Mail.app, which is acutally a special kind of directory that contains all the config and code to run the application.

Having said all that, user directories don't normally sit in the root filesystem. They should be in the user's home directory, which should be somewhere like /Users/<username> but I can't quite remember!

For a start, the Mac doesn't use X11 as it's windowing system, it uses Quartz and Aqua which are the proprietry components, or at least some of them, that make Mac OS X closed source. X11 is available for Mac OS X though, it's part of the develper package. If you install the developer tools from the OS X cds, it should be there.

Phew, far too late to go on about this any more without firing up my mac. Hope it's of some interest.

Cheers,

Steve

all the os x system files are stored in /System. preference files, misc config files either go in /Library or /Users/user/Library, and are grouped by application

apple has contributed a great deal to khtml project, since their web browser (safari) is a direct product of that project.