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OpenDarwin is a freely available, multi-platform BSD / Mach 3.0-based Unix-like operating system.

Founded in April 2002 by Apple Computer and Internet Systems Consortium, the goal of the OpenDarwin.org project is to create an independent branch of the Darwin operating system that increases collaboration between Apple developers and the open source community. Apple benefits from the project because improvements to OpenDarwin may be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the open source community benefits since it is given complete control over its own operating system, which can then be used in free distributions like GNU-Darwin.

On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a stand-alone Darwin OS had failed. They also state: "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."

Development and distribution


Version management


The OpenDarwin developers use CVS to manage changes to the OpenDarwin source code. Though many of the OpenDarwin developers are Apple employees, the OpenDarwin project is fully independent of Apple. The OpenDarwin developers have complete control over their code though they generally try to stay compatible with Apple's software.

Quality control


Like most modern operating systems, OpenDarwin employs a built-in kernel debugger to help the developers find kernel bugs.

Releases


The last OpenDarwin release was OpenDarwin 7.2.1 (corresponding to Mac OS X v10.3.2 on July 16, 2004; however mirrors of Apple's Darwin releases available as either source packages (Darwin 8.6 corresponding to Mac OS X v10.4.6) or CD installer images (Darwin 8.0.1 corresponding to Mac OS X v10.4) are available.
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