Cocoa open source would be cool

Here’s something I’d totally love to see at WWDC: the Cocoa framework open-sourced. Foundation and AppKit both.

It’s not that I want to work on it, and it’s not that I want to use _undocumented _private _methods, it’s that sometimes it would be really helpful to have the source so I can see what’s going on under the hood.

There are times when things don’t work as expected, or there’s some weird bug, and I want to look at the source—and be able to debug with the source—so I can see what the heck is actually going on.

I understand entirely that making Cocoa open source means a bunch of work. It wouldn’t be easy; it would be expensive. But Apple does have the WebKit experience to draw on.

And there are other drawbacks. But one drawback I think doesn’t exist: they don’t have to worry about competition. Is there somebody else who wants to create an Objective-C application framework for OS X? (Ah, nope.)

Apple would get big points for openness and generosity and developer support. (Assume that part of this would be making the bug tracker open to developers.)

(I have absolutely no inside knowledge. This would be an exciting and cool thing to have happen, but I put its likelihood somewhere around 0.01%.)