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Gee.. I have seen this before. How many times is this going to be posted on Slashdot. Get original. Here's on from OSNews here. How long have you been waiting to post this?

Yeah, modded "insightful" by GPL fanboys. Look, factually speaking, you're wrong. Apple has contributed code to FreeBSD.

Read this:
Since Mac OS X v10.0 was released in 2001, Apple has been filtering BSD code in and out of their kernel, userland, and libraries. This code then makes its way back to FreeBSD.(...) By the time Apple released Panther, their contributions back into FreeBSD had amassed into a new FreeBSD milestone, the 5.x branch. http://osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=New s&file=article&sid=938&mode=&order=&thold=

OpenBSM is derived from the BSM audit implementation found in Apple's open source Darwin operating system, which upon request, Apple relicensed under a BSD licence (wikipedia citation) OpenBSM: Open Source Basic Security Module (BSM) Audit Implementation http://www.trustedbsd.org/openbsm.html

Thomas Hormby is a high school student at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is a member of the Hume-Fogg Technology Society.

He maintains two Mac history websites, MLAgazine (not updated since June 2005) and macreate.net (suspended by ISP). Slashdot gave him a post that pointed to his MLAgazine in May 2005. He is a frequent contributor to OSViews, OSNews and OSOpinion.

And you're right, the little bastard needs to source his stories. Christ. At least he can look forward to a bright future in journalism.

Too bad Sony already said so, when Sony President Kunitake Ando announced on stage with Steve Jobs that this would be the "Year of High Definition."

Yes, WebCore is Apples fork of KHTML. Read here for an explanation on how the collaboration between the projects works.

SpecOpS Labs slaims in 1 year time-lapse...

1. We are developing our own "technology" to run Windows apps under Linux.
2. Oops! Urm... Yeah, Wine. It turns out our developers lied to us and took shortcuts. But we are using only parts of Wine and "optimizing" those parts to be able to run Windows apps.
3. Uhm... Yeah. We're still working on Project "David". Talk to you later...
4. Err... (shifts gaze left and right) We're stuck with this teeny-tiny problem that Pagemaker still has a few glitches in it. But honest and truly, we have the best programmers in the Philippines working on "David" right now.
5. Uh... Our programmers left. We'd pay Random J. Hacker $10,000 to develop XP compatible "modules" for Wine. But you only have 15 days to do it.

The VC's who put their money into SpecOpS Labs are probably itching to get their ROI by now. They probably burned through their capital funding and now the VC's want some returns, or at least a product that can be marketed. These guys are desperate now. $10,000 is probably the only money they have left and the VC's won't give them anything more unless they come up with something.

I always thought these people were just VC fishers.

See also their previous page with buzz-word laden spiels, and outlandish claims.

I thought it was relatively well-known speculation that much of NT was ripped off from DEC's VMS, especially considering DEC filed suit against Microsoft and MS ended up settling out of court.

http://osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=New s&file=article&sid=4954

Go read it...

Just don't take what IBM says as gold -- they have the same ego and saving face job Apple does.

Yes, those are good examples. Thanks.

My fault, I forgot to set the sarcasm flag. A quick check in FreeBSD, khtml branches and you can see how much Apple contributed. Just compare the ratio of how much Apple 'innovated', and how much they put back into the original project. Instead of the Apple PR links above, read the replies to this article and the recent Apple divorce KHTML articles everywhere.

Making money and open source are not mutually exclusive.

True, my point is that Apple is just as 'evil' as MS. Apple can't stand competitions, look what happened to Power Computing (or any of the Mac Clones). Look how Apple killed all mom-and-pop Mac stores (who have been supporting Macs since 90's) by making them non-competible with Apple Stores. Yeah yeah, they are doing it for greater user's good. Really? I would like to make my own decisions/judgements instead of someone insiting on that shipping a computer with 2-button mouse would confuse me.

Look at how much MS or Apple have given back to BSD as opposed to how much linux has got from IBM. Who has the better dynamic community of sharing?

Wow! I like when people are really openly intelectually dishonest! Do you fail to see that IBM is in the server market, and that Linux OS is just a complement it needs to turn into a commodity to them? OTOH, Apple did give back to FreeBSD (see Since Mac OS X v10.0 was released in 2001, Apple has been filtering BSD code in and out of their kernel, userland, and libraries. This code then makes its way back to FreeBSD. Apple's pattern is to sync every major Mac OS X release with the latest major FreeBSD release. and Apple hires open-source leader.)

Just because you are desinformed, or because you think Leenox is Kewl does not change the facts.
Here are some simple facts of life:
1) A pure open-source software house is a very hard to maintain thing. I'm not the one saying that, Miguel de Icaza of GNOME/Mono fame says it here

2) Because some company incorporates code under BSD license, does not mean the code went away. It's still there. Otherwise, is it envy that moves you, because some people are more technically knowledgeable than you? In that case, your problem is not a license problem, it is a problem only solved by study. Envy only means you've got mental problems, too. For instance, BitMover wrote better code than the open-source guys. Tough luck.

Let's be clear, Apple doesn't owe Linux a damn thing for using FreeBSD as it's base. It's a different group of people. And Apple pays back to FreeBSD in exactly the way that the open source model says it should, by using the software, and feeding back bug fixes.

See for example

There seems to be an undercurrent on here that companies doing the things that make a profit is somehow immoral. Which is as valid an opinion as any other, but why not just say "all companies are immoral", rather than picking on the ones that you particularly want to spend time on unprofitable stuff.

The New Xbox 2 (or Xbox 360?) is using the PowerPC , if fact Microsoft is currently using Apple G5 as the development platform. So they will have experiance on the Power architecture. I seem to remeber them doing some work in with NT on PCC in 98? but it was killed.

Posted anonymously to avoid whoring karma!!

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Top 10 Apple Flops

Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history.

[Image] Apple and its compatriots have been highly innovative. These companies have proven that even if their ideas are well implemented, they cannot always promote them correctly. Other times, a good idea is implemented poorly, and despite their best marketing effort, the product fails. I have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that have failed.

Apple Pippin

[Image] Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin should have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.

Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit only 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.

The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS and with a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs at that time. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizable portion of the market.

OpenDoc

[Image] The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wished to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor. Instead, they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full-blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.

OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as Live Objects.

In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated Video Conferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.

Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commercial products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicked the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had

Posted anonymously to avoid whoring karma!!

--

Top 10 Apple Flops

Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history.

[Image] Apple and its compatriots have been highly innovative. These companies have proven that even if their ideas are well implemented, they cannot always promote them correctly. Other times, a good idea is implemented poorly, and despite their best marketing effort, the product fails. I have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that have failed.

Apple Pippin

[Image] Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin should have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.

Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit only 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.

The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS and with a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs at that time. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizable portion of the market.

OpenDoc

[Image] The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wished to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor. Instead, they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full-blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.

OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as Live Objects.

In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated Video Conferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.

Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commercial products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicked the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had

Posted anonymously to avoid whoring karma!!

--

Top 10 Apple Flops

Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history.

[Image] Apple and its compatriots have been highly innovative. These companies have proven that even if their ideas are well implemented, they cannot always promote them correctly. Other times, a good idea is implemented poorly, and despite their best marketing effort, the product fails. I have compiled 10 of the most notable products released by Apple or its comrades that have failed.

Apple Pippin

[Image] Introduced under Spindler's rule as CEO, the Pippin should have won Apple a position in the console market, one Apple had yet to penetrate. Apple's goal was to make the Pippin a multimedia machine, capable of reading CD ROMs, surfing the internet and to play games.

Apple had decided to share the Pippin's source code with developers for a licensing fee. The developers had a lot more flexibility, and would be able to redesign the Pippin's software to make it attractive for any number of markets. However, Apple was able to recruit only 4500 developers willing to pay the licensing fee.

The operating system of the Pippin was based on the MacOS and with a PowerPC 603 running at 66 MHZ, the Pippin used a similar processor to desktop macs at that time. Being a multimedia machine, the Pippin was capable of producing CD quality sound, and displaying up to thousands of colors. With the powerful Power PC processor, Apple thrashed Nintendo and Sega consoles performance wise, but never won a sizable portion of the market.

OpenDoc

[Image] The concept behind OpenDoc is an intuitive one. Many elements of applications are redundant (calculators, multimedia players, spreadsheets). Why not 'cut them up' and use different modules interchangeably. Each file would then make calls on these different modules as needed. With OpenDoc, if a user wished to create a word processor document that includes a spreadsheet, the user would not have to copy it over as a table, or use a gimped up version included with the word processor. Instead, they could call up the ClarisWorks for OpenDoc Spreadsheet module and have a full-blown spreadsheet in the middle of a word processing document.

OpenDoc development started in 1995 in collaboration with Novell, IBM and Apple. In 1997, Apple integrated OpenDoc into its core strategy, releasing several OpenDoc apps, and including the technology in Mac OS 7.6. At the same time, the technology was being developed for Windows and UNIX. The companies created the Ci Labs which would authorize OpenDoc components that proved to be compatible as Live Objects.

In accordance to Apple's vision, it became possible with the OpenDoc compatible version of ClarisWorks to create a document that integrated various OpenDoc modules. The example below has an integrated Video Conferencing session with QuickTime, a browser frame from CyberDog and a graph from another OpenDoc module.

Since 1996, Novell has ceased Windows development of OpenDoc, forcing IBM to take on responsibilities for the platform at the same time they continued development on their AIX (UNIX from IBM). The two versions both evolved and were mature commercial products in 1997. There were problems for OpenDoc, however. At the same time, Microsoft released ann updated version of OLE, and released ActiveX, that closely mimicked the OpenDoc principles. OpenDoc was embraced by major OS developers, but it had

Your post reminded of the similar recent story I heard of MS offering cut-down versions of MSW to less economically developed countries (called MSW XP Lite). When I googled for "XP Lite" to find out about this, this article came up near top of hits, OSViews.Com: Microsoft Windows XP Lite and Monopoly Maintenance .

The page now states:

This article has been removed because many points made within it have been deemed unfactual.

"Unfactual" isn't even a word!

I hate to plug my own shit but here's my whole take on the Gentoo-bashing stuff. To make a long story short, Linux distros are like punk bands - the hardcore (lame) punk fans only like a band until it makes it big. Once that happens they turn their backs on it and find a less paletable, more obscure group.

Screw em'. Let them be fucktards if they want to. I use Gentoo because it's easy. I'm lazy and it works every time - in a predictable way. The product is great, the forums are great, and if I run any other distro it's because I am in a time crunch or because it's at work and people will only sign off on Redhat. To me, distros boil down to the package managment and the community support. Gentoo excels in both areas.

Here's the original link... but now the page says:
"This article has been removed because many points made within it have been deemed unfactual." :-)
That was a lousy article indeed. The *BSDs deserve much better reviews.

I hope I am not flaming a religious war here, but upon reading the piece with the quote:

"The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting
technology, generally regarded as comparable
with or superior to what is offered in Linux."

I wonder how superior FreeBSD 5.x is to Linux 2.6.x ?

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said today that based on a survey of 600 teenagers, Apple's iPod is dominating "mindshare and market share." Munster said in a research note that of all the high school students surveyed, 16 percent currently own an iPod and 24 percent plan to buy an iPod within the next year. Munster also noted that the iPod ranked fourth on the teens' holiday wish list--behind clothes, money, and a car--even though the iPod was not an answer option and had to be written in as a response.

The problem with that analysis is that it's much too kind to the underdog operating systems.

I'm having a hard tiime finding good numbers, but it seems that Apple's market share has generally been in decline over the years, with most sources citing a market share or install base fluttering around three or four percent for the past couple of years, with some wildly optimistic speculation that Apple could hit eight percent by 2008.

In the most recent report I could find, Apple's market share was put at 3.7%, with recent quarter growth of 9.3% -- but this is in a market where Dell alone has a share of 32.9%, and the market overall grew by 10.9% in the USA and 15.5% globally. That is to say, even though Apple is "growing" relative to their own recent performance, they're still not growing at a rate that keeps up with the industry as a whole, and they're especially slipping behind global figures. Their market share trend is going down, even as their health as an individual company appears to be holding steady or improving.

Meanwhile, figures for Linux are harder to determine, but it seems that the past couple of years suggest that Linux has hovered at a steady 1%, so the picture isn't any stronger on that side -- they're doing at best 1/3 of what Apple is doing.

(And yes, market share figures are all voodoo that is about as reliable as hardware benchmarks (that is to say, hardly reliable at all), but still, the discussion doesn't work if you don't at least take a stab at quantifying things. So please, grant me some leeway here :-)

More to the point, it doesn't seem like Google has ever had a problem with catering to just the dominant platform. Consider the Google Toolbar, which has been available for years as an IE only plugin on Windows -- it has never been available for the Mac version of IE, and it has never been offered for other operating systems (they just meekly suggest putting links to Google in your Netscape bookmark bar, but that hardly counts for much). Admittedly, Mozilla has had third-party Google search plugins for a while now, and when Safari came out it had a built-in Google search box, but these were both provided by third-parties, not Google.

The only client-side software Google has offered in the past has been for Windows and IE, and the Picassa acquisition is just a continuation of this pattern.

I played around with Picassa for a little while last night, and it is a pretty slick application; I can see why they wanted it (the UI is quite clever, and they may want to put some of the people who thought it up to work on their existing web tools & webmail). I'd love to see a version of it for OSX (please, please something better than iPhoto), but I'm not convinced that that Google will bother porting it, based on the questionable market share trends and their past client-side offerings.

If you clench your spincter any tighter, your brain is likely to come shooting out like a watermelon seed.

TOG v. Apple appears to be in limbo. The last mention I've found after searching is this one, an article at OSviews There is no mention of the litigation in Apple's May 6 10-Q. This leads me to believe that a settlement was reached with non-disclosure as part of the deal.

If this is the case, it tells us that TOG settled because (as the first article states) TOG has a lot to lose and it doesn't have a slam dunk case, for the reasons Shaitland gave you.

My advice to you, young AC, is to unclench and accept that there are many ambiguities in life and legal ambiguities in business.

Remind me what their marketshare is worldwide? I bet it's less than 1%.

Here are two editorials that respond to that flaimbait. I suggest you (and others that adopt this way of thinking) read them.

The New FUD: Apple Market Share

Gartner Research - Server Install-base vs. market share

Remind me what their marketshare is worldwide? I bet it's less than 1%.

Here are two editorials that respond to that flaimbait. I suggest you (and others that adopt this way of thinking) read them.

The New FUD: Apple Market Share

Gartner Research - Server Install-base vs. market share

Apple sales ARE up... It's just Powermacs that are down now.

Don't be confused about market-share. Too many people misappropriate market share for install-base. Apple can triple its install base and still decrease its market share if the rest of the industry quadruples its sales.

This article puts things into perspective

Man, don't be a cut-and-paste troll. This was lifted verbatim from an article at osViews.com yet you make it sound like you came up with this yourself. You did not, you are just cutting and pasting someone else's insightful words.

Moderators, please do not reward cut-and-paste trolls. If someone looks like they deserve an upmod then take the time to do a quick Google search to see if they are taking credit for someone else's words.

Please mod the parent down accordingly...

Man, don't be a cut-and-paste troll. This was lifted verbatim from an article at osViews.com yet you make it sound like you came up with this yourself. You did not, you are just cutting and pasting someone else's insightful words.

Moderators, please do not reward cut-and-paste trolls. If someone looks like they deserve an upmod then take the time to do a quick Google search to see if they are taking credit for someone else's words.

Please mod the parent down accordingly...

In that respect, he is wrong. The MacOSX printing proves that he is wrong. MacOSX uses the same CUPS core that Fedora uses, but it has a better GUI slapped on top. The GUI was slapped on top after CUPS had been written.

One of the big changes from Rhapsody to OS X was that adhering to Apple UI become more important than adhering to the NeXT UI. Apple users were not willing to accept NeXT/Unix with a Apple compatibility layer. And with each release you are seeing more of the NeXT implementations replaced with Carbon implementations (though the interface stays the same).

For example, originally Cocoa and Carbon's menu systems were very differerent. But in a later release (10.1 I believe), the Cocoa system was rewritten on top of the Carbon one. Concepts like tear-off menus were abandonded because they weren't the Mac-way. Also, the Cocoa text system was rewritten to use ATSUI.

Apple also tells developers not to depend on command line tools. Installation of the BSD environment is optional. So in most cases, you are not suppose to just wrap up OSS tools. You can write new ones using OSS libraries, but Mac applications are not (supposed) to be wrappers around a command-line tool.

Then he rants on how OSS can never deliver the brilliant GUI designs of MacOSX and Windows.

As to market share, that is entirely irrelevant. What matters is install base. And Linux on the desktop won't be passing Apple on that for a while, if ever. Especially if you count desktop, which does not include POS and other situations where the computer is being used for 1 purpose only as opposed to running multiple general/business software packages. While some POS systems are built with Mac OS X, that isn't Apple's market so their market share in that segment doesn't matter. But unfortunately, PC sales figures include that. So you're comparing Apples to Oranges.

osViews is holding a survey which asks that people rate their liklihood of buying one of these types of devices.

The results are very telling...

Thank Apple for FreeBSD

another lews link with coverage here

Clearly, you haven't voted in Kelly's very scientific survey to get to the correct download page. Vote once a day to make sure the results are accurate.

Well, there's that, there's also the poll about 64 bit computing, where almost 72% voted for the G5. Compare and contrast with the Mac's sub-3% market share, and you might start to clue in after years in a Jobsian RDF haze. Stop taking the blue pill, for Chrissakes.

> It even uses the gray apple "stripes" in its layout.

> Huh?

This. The OS X lines.

There is a survey on osViews that shows the choices people are making when buying music from the various services that have popped up.

The results are very interesting.

I think this is going to hinge on who has the best media player. According to this survey, iTunes has them all beat.

(If Microsoft's player doesn't favor WMP, it might have a better chance IMHO)

Regardless, the ipod is the leader in MP3 players anyways. I don't see why anyone would switch.

"Anyone know if theres a connection?"

Apparently so.

I also read somewhere that osOpinion was suing its parent (I forget its name) company. (looking for the link)

osViews.com has an interesting survey which asks its readers which of the paid music services people the plan on using to buy legal music. The results are very interesting.

osViews has a good discussion about this news already.