I probably shouldn't dignify this with a response, but yeah, you don't know what you're talking about. The kernel XNU is OSS. The BSD userland is OSS. This means that technically, the operating system is open source. If you go by file count, there is far more OSS in macOS than not. But if you want to go by file sizes, then the only closed source parts of macOS, again, are the GUI, the Quartz Compositor, and a lot of Apple's installed applications, which are bound to have large file sizes. So it is deceptive and frankly false to claim speciously there are, plural, "orders of magnitude more closed source than open in macOS."

But every release Apple releases more open source software.[1] No other proprietary operating system vendor releases more open source than Apple.

So, yeah, you're just wrong.

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/releases/

I think a lot of value comes with the Frameworks, with them you get at least source compatibility with macOS and without them the core operating system will just be another Unix operating system without much hardware supports.

So I personally put much more weight on the Frameworks over XNU and BSD userland. There is a reason GNUStep is less dead than PureDarwin :D

That's fine, but the frameworks are not installed with macOS. In order to get them, one must sign up for a free developer account, at least, and install Xcode, which is massive, but I'm not sure how you can say it is part of the OS when most people never install it.

The system frameworks e.g. Cocoa, Foundation, CoreServices come with every installation as binaries. These are the building blocks of the GUI and mac default apps. They act as the abstractions to the underlying BSD and Mach system and basically what define a macOS system. [1][2]

My point is I put more value on the closed source parts more than the core OS and even the GUI itself. If these were to be open sourced, practically means possibility of source compatibility (even binary compatibility) on Linux and that is huge deal for the public. On the other hand, I'm not sure how can anyone besides compiler and driver developers can benefits from Darwin being open source.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma... [2]https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ma...

Yeah, I almost spit my coffee.

>>…but the frameworks are not installed with macOS

To paraphrase Maursault, he has no idea what he's talking about and we shouldn't dignify him with an answer.

Cocoa/UIKit, Quartz, Core*, drivers, etc are all closed source and much larger (by line count) than the kernel and BSD stuff. You can even throw WebKit and LLVM (which are humongous) in the mix and it won't change the balance.

But since I can't link to them and neither can you, we're just going to keep saying the other one is wrong in a web forum.

And that is expected, because graphics takes up a lot of space, so this comparison is not intellectually honest. But I'd like to see you try running just the "Cocoa/UIKit, Quartz, Core*, drivers, etc" without the kernel and BSD userland. Without the GUI, we still have an operating system that is entirely OSS. With only the GUI, we have nothing that works.

> But I'd like to see you try running just the "Cocoa/UIKit, Quartz, Core*, drivers, etc" without the kernel and BSD userland

That's the point we can't because they are binaries (with strict EULA at that) but make it open source I can guarantee they will be ported to Linux within a year :D

> Without the GUI, we still have an operating system that is entirely OSS. With only the GUI, we have nothing that works.

entirely OSS operating system that lacked hardware supports to be useful, what is the point over something like Linux. Even FreeBSD supports more hardware.

>because graphics takes up a lot of space, so this comparison is not intellectually honest

I've written “by line count”. It's more code, lots of it, not binary size.

>Without the GUI, we still have an operating system that is entirely OSS. With only the GUI, we have nothing that works.

You're discussing merits, I've been arguing about an absolute value: lines of code.

But if you want to discuss merit, here's another objective data: Darwin has been open source for 20 years. No one runs it. Because all the value is at the top layers and lower closed source ones. See the trouble folks at Asahi Linux are going through to reverse engineer the M1's GPU graphic driver.