OpenDarwin’s Evolution At An End

July 28th, 2006: The OpenDarwin project, created to allow for development of Mac OS X Sources, has closed up shop.

The news came via a posting on the OpenDarwin site which states, “OpenDarwin has failed to achieve its goals in four years of operation”. The project was begun as a development environment to encourage communities to work on fixes and features for Mac OS X and Darwin OS.

The statement continued, “[OpenDarwin] moves further from achieving these goals as time goes on. For this reason, OpenDarwin will be shutting down”. Over the past few years, OpenDarwin has become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects, the group's leaders said.

The project has allegedly suffered for a number of reasons according to the statement. The most severe include availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community. “Administering a system to host other people’s projects is not what the remaining OpenDarwin contributors had signed up for, and they have been doing this thankless task far longer than they expected. It is time for OpenDarwin to go dark”, continues the statement.

The website said that it would carry on business as usual for several months to allow everyone time to move their projects elsewhere. Following the switching off of the servers, the group will continue to provide email and DNS redirection for its users.

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