Derived projects

Due to the free software nature of Darwin, there are many projects that aim to modify or enhance the operating system.

OpenDarwin

GNOME running on OpenDarwin.

OpenDarwin was a community-led operating system based on the Darwin system. It was founded in April 2002 by Apple Inc. and Internet Systems Consortium. Its goal was to increase collaboration between Apple developers and the free software community. Apple theoretically benefited from the project because improvements to OpenDarwin would be incorporated into Darwin releases; and the free/open source community supposedly benefited from being given complete control over its own operating system, which could then be used in free software distributions such as GNU-Darwin.^[17]

On July 25, 2006, the OpenDarwin team announced that the project was shutting down, as they felt OpenDarwin had "become a mere hosting facility for Mac OS X related projects," and that the efforts to create a standalone Darwin operating system had failed. They also state: "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this."^[18] The last stable release was version 7.2.1, released on July 16, 2004.^[19]

PureDarwin

In 2007, the PureDarwin project was launched to continue where OpenDarwin left off, and is currently working to produce a release based on Darwin 9. There is a developer preview available, called "PureDarwin XMas", based on Darwin 9. This release has X11, DTrace, and ZFS.^[20] PureDarwin nano is another release of PureDarwin that is supposed to be minimalistic.

Other

• MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) and Fink are both well known projects to port UNIX programs to the Darwin operating system and provide package management. In addition, several standard UNIX package managers—such as RPM, pkgsrc, and Portage—have Darwin ports. Some of these operate in their own namespace so as not to interfere with the base system.
• GNU-Darwin is a project that ports packages of free software to Darwin.
• The Darwine project is a port of Wine that allows one to run Microsoft Windows software on Darwin.^[21]
• SEDarwin is a port of TrustedBSD mandatory access control framework and portions of the SELinux framework to Darwin.^[22] It was incorporated into Mac OS X 10.5.^[23]
• The Darbat project is an experimental port of Darwin to the L4 microkernel family. It aims to be binary compatible with existing Darwin binaries.^[24]
• There are various projects that focus on driver support: e.g., wireless drivers,^[25][26] wired NIC drivers^[27][28][29] modem drivers,^[30] card readers,^[31] and the ext2 and ext3 file systems.