Darwin (2)

It is clear that scientific tools must be demonstrably and penetratingly understood, or else our claims will likely be skewed and called into question. Free and open source software is a great example of how to make your science verifiable to the public. Establishing prior art against future patents is another good one, which is precisely analogous in method, making the result explicit to the public, free and open to all. Thank goodness for the free and open software movement, which gave us such a great example of how to serve the public in this manner.

I am willing to grant that there are particular exceptions to these rules of freedom and openness, and such exceptions may be relatively harmless; however, let us posit the opposite, that freedom and openness are _not_ crucial to understanding. Think of the implications. When people are compelled to learn, they do not receive the intended message. It is not understood correctly or completely. When crucial facts are withheld from the people you are trying to teach they become paranoid, possibly unteachable. Freedom and openness are obviously the best approach to understanding.

This is not a metaphor for the pursuit of science, but a fact. We are learning from nature, and it is ultimately required that our tools be demonstrably and penetratingly understood, or else we will receive incorrect lessons from nature. Clearly this requires public access to the source code and more. This is why many of us are pressing for public access to scientific publications.

Moreover FOSS tools are becoming ever more important to the pursuit of the scientific endeavor itself. In our biophysics department we are obsolescing proprietary hardware and software in favor of open standards and free software, which is a widespread phenomenon in the science sector, and sure to continue. We build most of the workstations ourselves with commodity hardware, but we also have some clusters running Debian and FedoraCore.

Some of you will know that I am the lead developer for the GNU-Darwin distribution. GNU-Darwin has a FOSS operating system, which is getting alot of press these days. Here is an example

How Apple and Microsoft are advancing desktop Linux http://www.desktopLinux.com/news/ns7294331817.html

I see the article as counter-productive against building a FOSS coalition that includes democracy, freedom, and public access activists, Apple, GNU-Darwin, GNU, and GNU/Linux all linked together in spectrum.

It is important to alert the whole FOSS community that Darwin cannot be classified as a free or open source operation system as of the Darwin-8 revision, because AppleACPIplatform-39 which is required to boot the system is proprietary. It is notable that only the current version of Darwin from Apple is a non-free OS. GNU-Darwin has a free version, an earlier revision that includes the source code. It is FOSS, and we call upon Apple to maintain Darwin as such, as it has been in the past. We hope that the current situation with the kernel and ACPI driver will soon be remedied so that Darwin will continue as a FOSS OS.

We are asking for free software developers to please write to the *nix core of Darwin, which is the core OS for both Mac OS X and GNU-Darwin OS. Darwin OS, which underlies both systems, comprises parts from GNU, the BSD's, mach, plus Apple's substantial contributions to the free software community. Be consistent with your philosophy and avoid linkage to proprietary binaries, such as OpenGL and CoreAudio, except when it is imperatively required in order to lead users to the values of software freedom. Under that principle, another reason to maintain compatibility with the *nix core, is so that your code will be readily portable to new platforms and usable by free-software-only aficionados too.

GNU-Darwin OS is not an obsolete implementation of Darwin OS, or to be superseded by Mac OS X. We are trying to lead users to freedom, not away from it. By maintaining Darwin core compatibility your code will remain valuable as the marketplace and industry continues to evolve (trust me here), particularly as DRM-related problems continue to come forward. Of course, that means releasing your source code under a FOSS license, such as APSL. Darwin OS is a free and open source operating system that is not going away, so try to focus your coding towards supporting that standard instead of proprietary software.