The Improbable Existence of PureDarwin

Mac OS/X, or “macOS” as Apple would like me to stylize it but that ain’t happening, is based on a number of prior OSes: NwXTSTEP, OpenBSD, and a kind of intermediate step after OpenBSD called Darwin. When OS/X was new Apple made much hay out of Darwin being open source. Was it ever really, completely? Once it may have been, but it’s said that gradually that’s become less and less true. It’s certainly not been super viable as its own thing for a while, needing some important parts, particularly a bootloader, to be able to run it. There is a project to make it viable though, called PureDarwin. It has a small but devoted cadre of people working on it. One of them, up until November of last year, was project leader Cliff Sekel, a.k.a. InsaneDarwin. Sadly he didn’t lay down the keyboard because of growing tired of it, but instead he passed away after an illness. Here’s an memorial from the PureDarwin website. Memorial from the PureDarwin site. Lots of projects would age into irrelevance…