I know, posting a /. article to your blog is much like telling someone something they were already thinking, but here goes:

Today Apple announced a few expanded open source efforts. First, beginning with Mac OS X 10.4.7, the Darwin/Mac OS X kernel, known as 'xnu', is again available as buildable source for the Intel platform, including EFI utilities. Second, iCal Server, Bonjour, and launchd are moving to Apache 2.0 licensing.

Welp, that's interesting. There's also talk about an Apple-"sponsored" replacement to DarwinPorts, and this would also seem to be a replacement for OpenDarwin, the project that recently closed for perceived lack of Apple's support in the open source sector.

So this can be interesting on a number of levels. I wonder if OpenDarwin didn't know the annoucement was coming and closed to make a statement. Sure, it looks like Apple's doing open source right now, but we all had high hopes with Apple Open Source 1.0, which went into the crapper. OpenDarwin was about to see its usefulness dry up with the Apple sponsored site, and decided to make the point at the last hour. So now that Apple's back, OpenDarwin helps us ask why we should believe the cry of wolf again? Isn't the fact that Apple's 'doing right' by open source now, so to speak, mean that it was doing wrong by open source earlier? I think this story at /. is a pretty clear admission by Apple that they were not toeing the ethical line.

Combine this screw up on open source that needed redressing with Apple's new IncrediMail.app (perhaps more precisely pictured here), blasting the plain text email movement to heck, and there's a dark, slimy underbelly coming out that I would've preferred I ignore.

Ah, well, I have burned an Ubuntu CD recently. Maybe I'll get uppity and pretend to switch like all the "cool" Mac hardware users, mainly because I don't have a Mac with an Intel chip and can't install Windows like it sounds like the whiners really wanna.