While the product was actually released more than an year after, on the 5th of April 2000, the move signalled a big change for Apple, which openly embraced the open source movement after the false start of MkLinux a few years before.

The announcement of Darwin (and of an open source version of QuickTime Streaming Server) was closely related to the the first version of Apple’s NeXT generation operating system, Mac OS X Server, announced in January at Macworld.

So in March, just a few days apart, Apple shipped both its new server operating system and at the same time released freely many of its core foundations.

Darwin’s birth and Apple’s push into the open and free world were initially met with mixed reaction, with many people not knowing whether or not to trust Apple’s motives and the Apple Public Source License (APSL) chosen for the source code. The license was modified at least three times and only in 2003, after being already accepted by the Open Source Initiative as an “open source license” it also gained the “free software license” status by the more stern and orthodox Free Software Foundation.

The Cupertino company eventually began to get acceptance of its open efforts, adding through the years many projects such as Bonjour/Zeroconf, WebKit and Calendar Server to mainstays Darwin and Darwin Streaming Server enduring to this day a fruitful although occasionally rocky relationship with the open source community.