Matti Robinson
1 Oct 2017 12:05
Apple, without fanfares or even a special announcement, released today the iOS and macOS kernels to the public as open source.
What we are talking about here are the cores of Apple's operating systems, known as XNU (which is an acronym for XNU is Not Unix), that are used in iPhones, iPads, and in the case of macOS all the Mac computers. XNU has been Apple's kernel of choice since the early 2000s.
Now all the latest kernel versions can be found straight from Github, an online repository and cloud storage mostly used for code, with the exception of the newest mobile platform version, iOS 11.
With the open source releases Apple hopes to educate developers about the relations between kernel and software working on top of it.
The software is released under Apple Public Source License 2.0, which isn't exactly a free for all. You can read more about the license here.