alt Hacker NewsThere was a community around Darwin for a while, and people released Darwin distros that ran X11 and a variety of ported Unix software. You’re right that it never really amounted to anything serious though. Within Apple, open sourcing Darwin seems to mainly have been a marketing ploy to get Unix/Linux people interested in Mac OS X by tying it to the hype around the open source movement. There’s a good article with more information here: http://www.synack.net/~bbraun/writing/osfail.html
The premise of that article is way off base. Darwin didn't fail, because the point wasn't to create a robust open source operating system along the lines of Linux. Apple got everything they needed from the OSS community while providing no more than they were required to. Apple got a bunch of tools, utilities, shells, etc as well as a view that this was a Real UNIX Operating System (TM) (they even got it certified) and that inarguably sold millions of machines
Their goal was never to build a community around Darwin or get a bunch of people outside the company using Darwin sans Mac OS X's proprietary bits, or to get a bunch of people outside the company contributing to Darwin