openlaunchd

It doesn't have much significance. Apple does this for all (major) macOS releases. macOS and iOS are built off of open source components, for which Apple releases the source code now and then. It's a courtesy for the most part - most of these are BSD licensed and therefore don't strictly require source code to be released. These notably don't include much of mac/iOS proprietary user interface components, drivers, or system frameworks - basically everything that makes macOS/iOS remotely interesting. The source code drops are helpful for the creation of other Unix-like operating systems based on the open source macOS kernel (see also the defunct Open/PureDarwin projects), and the released apps are sometimes ported (e.g. the GnuStep project has some older version of Chess.app and others ported over). There's some off and on efforts in the Fr

It looks like the FreeBSD folks have been doing some work[0][1] in that area. Sadly, it doesn't seem like it's actively being worked on at the moment. FreeBSD's init system works well enough, but there's no question that it could be better. [0] https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd [1] https://github.com/freebsd/openlaunchd

It's already running. https://github.com/outbackdingo/launchd_xml https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd Works on 10.1

The article's not particularly accurate on that note. There is a project to port launchd to FreeBSD, but it's basically stalled: no commits or mailing list posts in over a month, and it's not clear that it's even been successfully compiled on FreeBSD yet. https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd

launchd makes heavy use of Mach IPC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) ) which makes a port to any other non Mach derived OS a non trivial effort. There was apparently an effort to port it to FreeBSD - https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd and more recently https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd/blob/master/README.md .

I'm not a heavy Linux user -- I mainly use Windows and FreeBSD -- but I'm curious to know why none of the Linux distros have looked at using launchd? It's being ported to FreeBSD (https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd); is there some reason it couldn't work with Linux, or is it just being overlooked/ignored? I have heard that launchd doesn't have all of the features systemd does, but launchd does seem to be fairly solid for the features it does support.

Just my two cents as I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread: launchd is the init system used by Mac OSX and has been ported to FreeBSD a few years ago with a recent resurgent effort for improvements [1]. It has been suggested that launchd could one day be the new FreeBSD init system due to speed and feature improvements, but many FreeBSD users think that the init system is a non-issue and efforts could be better spent elsewhere. launchd has also been criticized as to have been developed for OSX and not BSD (e.g. it depends on CoreFoundation features). There is growing concern that applications will become more reliant on systemd and therefore Linux-only features [2], reducing or eliminating portability to the BSDs. Unfortunately, most conversations about init systems and FreeBSD degenerate into flame wars [3]. [1]: https://github.com/

Here's the link to the port-in-progress of launchd to FreeBSD, if anyone is curious: https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd

The FreeBSD Foundation does get some monetary support from both commercial users and end-users; some commercial FreeBSD users (e.g., Netflix, Juniper) have core developers on their payroll, so they indirectly contribute in that way instead. FreeBSD also benefits when companies release or contribute to other BSD-licensed, open-source projects, since that code can then be used within FreeBSD itself. Apple's (and Intel's) contributions to Clang/LLVM are a prime example; another is Apple's open-sourcing of launchd, the FreeBSD port of which was just relaunched (no pun intended): https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd But yes, as some GPL proponents will point out, there are companies who use FreeBSD for their commercial products without contributing back. In the end, they probably lose out as much as anyone though, due to the cost of paying de