While it's true that Apple has released a lot of open source code, unfortunately it's not as easy as that to get an open source Darwin up and running. I speak as someone who's spent a lot of time recently trying. Many of the projects released don't compile because of problems with either the build environment or missing dependencies.
As one example: you mention CoreFoundation. Core foundation requires the open source Objective-C to run, which in turn requires the closed source "libauto" garbage collection library -- with the result that you can't run Core Foundation. And without CoreFoundation you don't get vital stuff like launchd.
Visit PureDawin.org for a few more of these gotchas and progress trying to get things working. Apple will fix these problems when people find them, so the more of us looking at the code the better.
by SJC — Sep 27
As one example: you mention CoreFoundation. Core foundation requires the open source Objective-C to run, which in turn requires the closed source "libauto" garbage collection library -- with the result that you can't run Core Foundation. And without CoreFoundation you don't get vital stuff like launchd.
Visit PureDawin.org for a few more of these gotchas and progress trying to get things working. Apple will fix these problems when people find them, so the more of us looking at the code the better.