The Cupertino, California-based company announced that it has posted buildable kernel source code for Intel-based Mac OS X, and has also launched a new code hosting project at Mac OS Forge to host internal and external projects.
Mac OS Forge can be seen as a successor to the external OpenDarwin project, which powered down its servers at the end of July after having failed in its initial goal to create an open source Mac OS X community around the core Darwin code base.
Mac OS Forge has already picked up the WebKit web browser engine project from OpenDarwin, and is also playing host to Apple’s iCal Server, Bonjour service discovery and Launchd process management projects, which have moved to the Apache 2.0 license.
Although Mac OS X is based on the FreeBSD and Mach OS open source code base, Apple has been less open with some of its own developments over the years. In announcing the new project, the company’s open source product manager, Ernest Prabhakar, maintained that Apple is more excited than ever about the power of open source development to create value for our (and your) products and customers, however.
