CFNetwork Should Be Open Source (Again)

Originator:bfulgham
Number:rdar://7195752 Date Originated:03-Sep-2009
Status:Open Resolved:
Product:Mac OS X Product Version:10.6
Classification:Enhancement Reproducible:Always
 
03-Sep-2009 02:04 PM Brent Fulgham:
During the Tiger shipping cycle, the network support portions of CoreFoundation (CFNetwork) were Open Source, just as the CFLite sources are.  For some reason, the sources were no longer distributed starting with Leopard release of Mac OS X.

The CFLite sources are now in use outside of Apple (see http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencflite/) and are now part of a handful of shipping products under Windows and Linux (see for example the Appcelerator Titanium system (http://www.appcelerator.com/appcelerator-platform/).  We have all grown to appreciate the container types, runloop support, and other utilities in CFLite.

One of the nice things about CFLite is that I can easily take code written on my Mac, and compile it to run under Linux or Windows.  I am now in the process of attempting to port a large Windows application to run under Mac OS X.  It has a lot of network functionality, which would align nicely with CFNetwork were it available.

I would like to request that the CFNetwork sources (or at least a subset of its functionality related to hostname lookup and Bonjour support) be open sourced.  I believe this would provide the following advantages to Apple:

1.  Increased uptake of CoreFoundation as a general purpose, cross-platform library would facilitate porting of applications to the Mac OS.
2.  Security engineers would be able to audit and validate the source code, increasing overall platform security.
3.  Presence of the source and examples on more development platforms would increase developer mind share, and help extend the visibility and utility of Apple development tools.
4.  More eyes looking at the code would benefit the source base as a whole.

I hope that you can open source at least portions of CFNetwork so that its use can be extended outside of Apple.

Comments

it's http://opensource.apple.com/tarballs mirek! ;)

By rusin.mirek at Oct. 27, 2011, 2:47 p.m. (reply...)

...yes, but that's not zip - how do you get this source zipped or git/svn/whatever instead of clicking on every single file?

By rusin.mirek at Oct. 27, 2011, 2:45 p.m. (reply...)

there are several different versions of CFNetwork available...

erm, do you mean this? http://opensource.apple.com/source/CFNetwork/

By rarichter at Sept. 18, 2009, 3:21 p.m. (reply...)

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