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Drivers and Licensing
by hurdboy on Thu 27th Jul 2006 12:27 UTC
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Darwin's biggest problem: The IA32 versions released prior to the Intel switch ran on a very limited set of hardware (sounds like NeXTstep!). Essentially you were limited to a PII/PIII on a board with an older Intel chipset, and just a few network cards. Because IOKit is quite a bit different than the driver frameworks in either Linux or BSD, many free software developers were probably scared off if they had the hardware to actually get it running in the first place.

On PPC, you'd have better luck, but most of the free software development these days doesn't seem to be happening on PPC. OpenBSD and NetBSD have pretty good PPC support, but that stems from the portable design adopted so long ago. Linux's PPC support, despite lots of work from IBM, still is probably a good six to eight months behind IA32/AMD64. FreeBSD's PPC port has been real-soon-now for about four years now I guess. :-p

And I think people were scared off by the initial APSL. Even though Apple amended it so it's a pretty good license now, that initial problem turned people off. If XFree86 changed their license back to something that's GPL-and-BSD compatible, do you think people would flock back to it? Nope.

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