Darwin Ports Dead?
Not exactly. I found out today, when trying to do a port update, that Open Darwin is now a dead project. They hosted Darwin Ports. Darwin Ports will become MacPorts. Hosting is already being provided by Apple.
This is just one of those things that makes me wonder at the viability of "free" (liberty, beer, or otherwise) software. I like free software. I use it quite a bit. But only the popular packages like Apache, with IBM backing, and GCC, Emacs, Vim, etc, really seem to have any strong chance of survival.
The reason I decided to update Darwin Ports was because I had just done a CVS update of SBCL (to 0.9.18) and Carbon Emacs (Emacs 21 is only available via CVS!). Emacs is probably the largest and most significant free software project outside of GCC. Never mind the name recognition of Linux. Linux would not be possible without the FSF tools that are used to build it, including glibc.
There is a very good reason for using free software: avoiding vendor lock. Vendor lock does more than simply limit your options when it comes to upgrading (or not as the case may be). Vendor lock reduces the number of competitors in the market place. This leads to a reduction in diversity which, in turn, leads to a reduction in innovation.
I'm also not in the habit of subscribing to all the mailing lists. And so here I am posting old news. I guess I also don't upgrade frequently enough.
