Games - Darwin

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Darwin is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Computer in 2000. It is also the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed.

In April 2002 the ISC and Apple founded OpenDarwin, a community to foster cooperative Darwin development. OpenDarwin creates its own releases of the Darwin OS. A notable subproject of OpenDarwin is DarwinPorts, which has the goal of assembling a next-generation collection of ports to Darwin.

The Darwin developers decided to adopt a mascot in 2000, and chose Hexley the platypus over other contenders, such as an Aqua Darwin fish, Clarus the dogcow, and an orca. Apple Computer does not sanction Hexley as a logo for Darwin.

Development and distribution

Quality control

Like most modern operating systems, Darwin employs a built-in kernel debugger to help the developers find kernel bugs.

License

In July 2003 Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the APSL license, which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open Source Definition.

Releases

This is a table of Darwin releases with their dates of release and their corresponding Mac OS X releases. Note that the corresponding Mac OS X release may have been released on a different date; refer to the OS X pages for those dates.

Notice that the version number jumps from Darwin 1.4.1 to 5.1. This was presumably done to continue the NEXTSTEP versioning (which left off at NEXTSTEP 3.3; OpenStep is considered version 4.0).

Darwin free distribution projects

There are many projects aiming at building free operating systems based on the Darwin platform. The pioneer in such field is OpenDarwin, started in 2002.

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