number 9

Happy New Thing. 

 So anyway, Adam Leventhal found out AAPL hamstrung DTrace w.r.t. certain apps on Leopard (iTunes at least).  Cue inevitable Slashdottian outrage.

When source code gets released under a license everyone (so long as they follow those terms) gets to port, extend, or shout about how your license isn’t free at all really. They can even choose to ignore you, or to provide really shitty implementations. None of the above makes them ‘evil’.

Some of OS X is open source, some is  proprietary, and some is riddled with DRM. iTunes is in the last category. It’s Apples main cash cow; if it was reverse engineered they’d lose a competitive advantage, scare their movie/music business partners away, and the terrorists would win.

OSX ships with a full toolchain and part of that is Instruments - a GarageBand-like frontend to DTrace. It’ll probably be the first contact with DTrace a lot of coders get. I’ve only tinkered with it, but right away you can see why it’d make DRM fans twitchy. Running iPhoto under Instruments let me see down into the Cocoa API calls. I now know how atomic preference changes are implemented at the system call level.  Basically, it’s fucking great.

It was really nice of Apple to give it out for free, just like it was nice of Sun to give us DTrace, ZFS and NFS. Telling either company how they should release any of those products makes you a bit of a deRaadt in my book.