I have open sourced NetBuild. See here for details.
Introduction
In early 2003, my then-coworker Mac Murrett saw that Xcode had a problem. It took forever to compile large-scale C++ projects, even on the fastest Macintosh hardware.
Why not, he thought, replace the cc executable used by Xcode with our own pass-through utility, which would distribute the individual file to a network of machines for compilation?
Now, this is not a new idea. Windows has several commercial distributed-compilation products, and there is an open-source utility, distcc, as well. But our version would use Rendezvous to build and maintain its list of helper machines dynamically and would work seamlessly with Project Builder.
Oh, and we were going to sell it for $450 a seat.
We were ready in time for MacHack 2003, so we handed out buttons there.
It was when we tried to arrange to get NetBuild listed in ADC News that we realized something was up. At first, our ADC request seemed to be going fine. Then: nothing. We didn't show up in the ADC newsletter, we didn't hear from anyone. MacHack came and went with no news. Then came WWDC....
At WWDC, Apple introduce Xcode 1.0, and one of its featured was a distributed build system. It was based on distcc, as it turned out, and anecdotal evidence suggested that our system was more efficient, but we could see the writing on the wall.
We closed down the Web site without having made a single sale.
Open Source
I have packaged up the NetBuild sources in a StuffIt archive: NetBuild.sit. Please be very careful to read the Readme.txt file. NetBuild only builds on Mac OS X 10.2 with Metrowerks CodeWarrior 8.3, and it requires StuffIt Expander 8.0.2 to expand its archive properly. (The StuffIt Expander that comes with 10.2 is not sufficient.)
For convenience sake, I am also providing a pre-built installer, NetBuild_Installer_2-28-2005.dmg. Because it is a trial installer, the NetBuild in it will expire around two weeks after the build date.
I am providing these sources in the hopes that someone else will update NetBuild to work on the current version of OS X. I used the 10.2 Project Builder to import the CodeWarrior projects into Project Builder format, so you don't need CodeWarrior to see the contents of the projects, even though the new projects don't build yet. Again, see the Readme.txt file for details. I will not be working on NetBuild anymore, nor do I even have access currently to a 10.2 machine to build it on, but I will be happy to answer any questions I can about it.
It is released under a simplified version of the Boost license. See any code file in the archive for details.