This was already discussed on Slashdot
When the original story broke,
http://www.slashdot.org had a story and discussion about it. To me, that discussion seemed FAR more informative than the talk I've read about this elsewhere, because it came from the viewpoint of Linux/Unix fans, many of who were actively involved in software development and some who wrote code that Apple's team shared while working on OS X and its apps (Safari, etc.).
It seemed to me that it boiled down to this article being, at best, "old news", and probably misleading -- making people think Apple suddenly locked down some code that used to be freely available.
The developers who discussed this whole thing said that they knew from day 1 that Apple was not going to release full source code for the x86 kernel for OS X. This wasn't some sort of mid-stream change by Apple. In fact, they say it's VERY difficult and confusing to compile up a working Darwin kernel from Apple's provided source for the PPC version - because header files and things have to be located, piecemeal, from all over the place to make it work.
Stop and think about it. Why is this a big deal to 99.999% of the Mac using community? The single biggest reason someone would be interested in source to an OS X x86 kernel is to recompile the latest versions, stripped of security measures, to make them run on non Apple hardware. Anyone legally using OS X on real Apple products won't benefit from that. The argument that "scientific applications in OS X might need custom tweaking of the kernel to make it leaner and meaner" is rather lame too. Seriously, OS X has never been a good choice for a "lean and mean" customized OS where timing is critical, in some sort of research/science setting. A better choice there would be an OS like Linux or BSD. OS X on XServe racks scales quite poorly in things like SQL Server transactions too. It's a great product for user-friendliness and ease of administration, and total integration with a Mac workstation environment. It's *not* your end-all, be-all, fastest solution if speed is more important than a nice GUI, ease-of-use, etc.
eSnow said:
So, in a way he underscores Yagers point - all PPC code and anything x86 except the kernel. Nice move, Apple. Not.