14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the release of the first 10.0 version of OS X, Apple made Darwin 1.0 available as an open source project in June 2000. Since then it has continued with this open-source approach to include eleven projects such as Bonjour, the intelligent networking technology formerly known as Rendezvous, WebKit, the rendering engine used in Safari and many other applications.
However, ever since the announcement that Mac will be moving form IBM powered PowerPC architecture to Intel powered x86 architecture, it became clear that there will be a constant struggle between the Apple team charged with keeping the OS X on Apple hardware and off generic PC boxes and the hackers who would be attempting to break OS X.
"Apple has begun restricting access to the source code of key components of Mac OS X, in what looks like a bid to prevent the Intel version from being hacked to run on non-Mac hardware," Simon Aughton reports for PC Pro. "Two open-source developers have separately reported that code which was previously available is now behind lock and key."
It seems that the story, which was first picked up by Slashdot, is not that simple. For one thing, there was a mistake on Apple's part and some files were indeed left out, but it was quickly corrected. However, there are components of the x86 version that are indeed not available, but they never were and never will be.
The kernel (XNU) is not available, this is probably because of the new AES commpage/dmos page encryption scheme which is being used to run Apple's encrypted Intel binaries such as Finder and Rosetta on the fly.