O say, can you C? If you can, you need to grab a copy of Darwin, the open source guts of OS X. This blended BSD is more accessible to those outside the Mac community now that Apple has elected to distribute bootable ISO CD images. Apple keeps Darwin in sync with OS X, so the current Darwin download, version 8.1, is exactly what you'll find in the just-released OS X 10.4.1. Why would anybody who doesn't use a Mac O say, can you C? If you can, you need to grab a copy of Darwin, the open source guts of OS X. This blended BSD is more accessible to those outside the Mac community now that Apple has elected to distribute bootable ISO CD images.Apple keeps Darwin in sync with OS X, so the current Darwin download, version 8.1, is exactly what you’ll find in the just-released OS X 10.4.1.Why would anybody who doesn’t use a Mac care about Darwin? In my view, because Darwin is a targeted, highly functional OS that is simple enough to be understood by developers. By simple, I don’t mean stripped or bastardized. Those who fear that Apple has done unconscionable things to BSD to make it more of a proprietary OS really need to look at the Darwin sources. By simple, I mean that Darwin is not Linux. Darwin is designed to target only two CPU architectures (PowerPC and x86). Apple is extremely conservative about merging new features into the core source tree. Darwin does not have a lengthy roll of committers who wander in and out of projects on which the distribution depends. And unlike some commercial Linux outfits, Apple hasn’t constructed Darwin as a low-priority charity/PR project. Darwin is OS X, fire-tested and validated, minus Apple’s protected intellectual property. And where IP is concerned, Apple has kicked an awful lot of its potential proprietary goodies (just consider Bonjour, QuickTime Streaming Server and Open Directory for starters) into the open source domain.You can scour Apple’s developer site day and night looking for details of OS X’s internals, but you’ll never find any reference as concise as the Darwin sources. The tree is small and I find it easy to digest.Darwin does boot on a Mac as a standalone OS, and there might be occasions where you find that useful. I’ve got Darwin partitions stashed away on some of my machines so that I can build and road-test open source projects before deploying them to OS X. I do find Aqua a distraction when I’m working on non-GUI apps. That’s most of the design and coding work I do. Having a Darwin partition also creates a rescue shell that takes up a lot less disk space than a spare instance of OS X, and Darwin is more forthcoming about and forgiving of boot-time problems than full-blown OS X. If nothing else, you should be aware of Darwin because open source projects are often tagged with Darwin as a target, and not OS X. It’s presumed that you know Darwin is OS X. With that knowledge, you’re ready to knock around Fink and Darwin Ports for those thousands of open source apps you just can’t live without. Be careful, though: Once you start digging, you’ll find yourself falling for some projects that reach beyond what Darwin provides and therefore won’t work on anything but a Mac. But even if you’re a hardcore open sourcer, you might find yourself gravitating toward those true OS X apps with the familiar Mac look and feel. ——– Technology Industry