This closed source thing

[Bamboo]

Warning. The following message is no flaimebait at all, it's just an honest personal opinion.

 

Great new (and less new) people recently happened to make big progresses, after Maxxuss disappeared.

 

The problem is that the legacy that Maxxuss left us is hard to figure, because it's closed source. MacVidia and ATi drivers are maturing, but they are closed source. Then there's this new guy who cracked the encryption and is figuring how to make kernels greater than 10.4.4.

 

I know the rationale for this closed source behavior. It's done so Apple can't easily figure how to restrict us from going further. In all honesty, I don't think that's a good reason (and I repeat that I respect everybody's work here and that I'm not flaming anybody). My idea is that Apple has enough resources to analyze whatever the osx86 community does and that they know the internals of Maxxuss patch better than anybody else, and even than Maxxuss himself. Apple must have their own "genius bar" disassembling everything that we build here in nearly real time. Perhaps a staff of 4 or 5 persons doing only that. Apple (and Mr. Jobs) is all about control. They know.

 

That's the way I see things. The community could greatly gain, IMHO, if they released the sources for what they do (drivers, decrypters, kernel hacks, anything). Peer review works. It does wonders. Moreover, people often lose interest in their pet projects, but new people appear all the time. Don't let them have to reverse engineer the whole thing each time they want to contribute. It's a terrible waste of time.

 

How many people here, two months ago, thought "but what if Maxxuss died?"? No offense to Maxxuss, but his great contribution to osx86 could have been even greater if he had opened his sources. Look at myzar's recent posts: he begins to figure what Maxxuss has done months ago. That could have been prevented. And once the source in on the net, it doesn't disappear. It's done, and it's done forever