I've been paying attention to this project periodically over the past few years. It would be nice to have a FOSS clone of macOS, similar to how FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku are FOSS clones of MS-DOS, Windows, and BeOS, respectively.

The only thing is that this project has been quite slow going, which is similar to the histories of FreeDOS, ReactOS, and Haiku, where it took a long time for those projects to get to a usable state. It is a lot of work cloning an operating system, especially with an aim for binary compatibility. The Linux kernel benefited from the fact that there was an entire GNU ecosystem of tools that can run on Unix, and even in that case, the GNU ecosystem was seven years in the making in 1991 when the first version of the Linux kernel was released. It would've taken much longer for Linux to have been developed had GNU tools not existed.

Writing an entire operating system is long, hard work, even when provided the resources of companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google. Hopefully projects like ravynOS and the similar HelloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/) will lead to FOSS clones of macOS eventually, even if we need to wait another 5-10 years.

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wwweston 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Sometimes it strikes me that something like this might be one of the better litmus tests for AI — if it’s really good enough to start 10x-ing engineers (let alone replacing them) it should be more common for more projects like this should begin to accelerate to practical usability.

If not, maybe the productivity dividends are mostly shallow.

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atherton94027 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is that many of these clean room reimplementations require contributors to not have seen any of the proprietary source. You can't guarantee that with ai because who knows which training data was used

	▲	soared 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Are those OSes actually that strict about contributors? That’s got to be impossible to verify and I’ve only seen clean room stuff when a competitor is straight up copying another competitor and doesn’t want to get sued

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adastra22 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was my thought here as well. Getting one piece of software to match another piece of software is something that agentic AI tools are really good at. Like, the one area where they are truly better than humans.

I expect that with the right testing framework setup and accessible to Claude Code or Codex, you could iterate your way to full system compatibility in a mostly automated way.

If anyone on the team is interested in doing this, I’d love to speak to them.

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MangoToupe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure. In the meantime productivity is still useful.