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How Can I Promote Open Source On The Macintosh?
Chris Buskirk asks: "I have been working with Macs most of my life. I have since expanded my view to Unix, and Linix. I also do NT for Pain and Profit. I have been a part of the Slashdot community for the past year now, and I have become convinced that open source is the best way to produce software. This week open-source software advocate Eric S. Raymond kicked off the 15th annual MacHack conference. Mac Week is covering the keynote address , and almost all of the responce to the article is negative. Surprisingly this is a departure from the recent mood among the Mac community which has been changing with the advent of OSX.
So the question becomes, How do I convince a Mac geek to become an Open Source Mac geek?" I hope that OSX is the spark to ignite the fires of Open Source on the Mac. Or at least bring it the visibility it deserves.
" Most people view Mac users as idiots. There has always been a constant myth that there are no programs for the Mac. However I dispute that claim as I have always been able to get any type of program I have wanted for the Mac, and usually for free. The Mac has always had a large and talented freeware/shareware communtiy, and I would think that this community would be very prone to embrace the open source movement. Once this base of programmers is secured, I would think larger companies would start to follow suit to one degree or another."
I've always thought the best way of promoting open-source software was to create it and release it.
If you do this successfully, it demonstrates the viability of open-source software on your platform. It also gives weight to your advocacy of the open-source model, since you are willing to put forth considerable effort towards that end.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Since the financial reward of Mac programming is generally (yes, a generality) less than that of Windows programming, wouldn't the barrier to adopting open source for the Mac be far less than the IBM world? (But maybe more than the UNIX/Linux world?)
There used to be a lot of freeware around. People also used to swap various hypercard stacks around and hacks that added features to hypercard (think excel, but much much cooler, a sort of graphical scripting language, but actually cool for the time, especially if you weren't a programmer, but there was fun stuff for programmers in it too).
I used to see a bit of source swapping and such going on as far as actual programs were concerned. There was always a bit of, "this is mine, I wrote it, I'm not going to enforce the fee, but it's there" penis-size contest going on there too, which a lot of people would be reluctant to give up, but all and all, I would think that there will eventually be a strong vein of mack open source hackers. Of course, the issue of the closed platform has always been what sort of drove hackers away from the platform. I like my PC because there is a lot more freedom for me to tinker with it. Even now, yeah, there's more slots, more hardware is supported, it's not quite like being able to say, "this board, this processor, this drive, and I'll put it all together over-night." Even the trouble that people have gotten into for extending the macintosh has driven many away. I must say, I love the SMP performance in the newer processors, but the Mac developers have never been a real, "Open up our box and screw with it," kind of team.
Eh...
The idea that companies will base their business strategies around selling support for their software (witness all the Linux companies) is kind of scary. Why? What incentive do they have to create high quality, easy to use applications? None. An easy to use or configure application means that their sole source of revenue is effectively dried up.
That's probably the biggest thing going for commercial apps. Companies expect to earn their money selling a product that doesn't require much support. There's actually money to be made as a result of the development process itself.
Sadly the Linux conferences seem much more like the big PC shows rather than the more intimate feel of the Hack - I think it's more like Usenix was back in the mid 80s
If you look at all the proprietary operating systems, their community is very different from
:-)
the BSD/Linux community.
Even the BeOS-community which seem to be rather
enthusiastic is still mostly closed source.
They have some OS apps, but the sophisticated ones, the ones that compete with Gimp and Kword,
is mostly commercial.
I'm not really sure that OSX could change this
for Mac.
OSX while opensource at the core, is still highly
proprietary in the areas that are really visible
to the user (User interface, tools, etc.).
Also consider who is likely to be buying a Macintosh. Considering the price, it is probably
mostly graphics, music and video -professionals
for the good stuff (G4's), and "average Joe" for the iMacs.
This doesn't create a very big base for an OSS-community. The windows market is HUGE,
but the windows OSS-community is remarkably small.
If Apple can release some sort of API that makes
software easily portable between the MacOS and
BSD/Linux, this whole situation could change.
Finally, I just want to say that I'm not trying
to bash either MacOS, Apple or their users.
If someone gave me a brand new G4, I would be
more than thrilled, but the price of them makes
sure that I'll probably stick to cheap x86-hardware.
MacOS X for x86? Hmm
Yeah, the demise of Hypercard has been a real low point in the history of Macintosh. HC used to be the best amateur-hacker environment around, and it also attracted a lot of people to the Mac. The Mac is not the same without it. It seems like HC fell out of favor just when the Web came around-- maybe because HC failed to very integrate with the Web, or maybe because html offered another easy outlet for part-time geeks.
Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others. -Winston Churchill
..with current mac developments, according to most of the reactions I've read to his talk. His comments to the effect that, Macs have good GUIs but need a better OS seem uninformed given the state of OsX development.. I think the negative reaction came from Mac developers who are well ahead in their OsX development who didn't appreciate being told to suck eggs by someone who hadn't done their homework. As well, Raymond's discounting the idea of the GUI as just a nice widget for users comes across as ignorant; the Mac interface (which followed PARC and led Windows) has set the standard for usability, which should be the FIRST priority of an OS, not just an add-on (with respect to projects like GNOME). It may be that the windows and mouse interface needs a replacement (i think so) and maybe the OsX Aqua interface goes some way to a rethink; maybe not. I prefer something like touch screens still, over voice access (i can type a CLI about ten times faster thanit would take to to explain it), but how do you deal with the messy fingerprints?
--
But it isn't true.
Besides. The GPL makes an exception for linking
against so called "system libraries".
This means that non-GPL-programs can link against
stuff like glibc.
GCC is GPL. It exists for BeOS, Solaris, Irix, etc, and they are all proprietary.
On the opposite side, Linux has plenty of
closed source applications, like Applixware,
Compupic, etc..
And I've wondered this myself. Frankly, I get pissed off when I see someone ask $5 for an AppleScript that I could write in 20 minutes. There are a few open source Mac programs out there (Gerry's ICQ, Mactella...), but it's mostly stuff that has its origin on other platforms.
Why haven't I written anything myself? Well, I haven't been in the game too long, and I haven't yet gotten past the "I wish there was a program that did this..." stage yet, and I just don't have a lot of spare time. If I was going to write an Open Source program, it would probably be for Linux or Mac OS X. Memory management on the Mac is kind of painful (damn handles).
What would it take to get me to write for Mac OS? Well, I wouldn't bother with Mac OS 9, since it's on its way out. Mac OS X is appealing, but it would really help if Cocoa was cross-platform (I know it is, but Apple won't license it for Windows any more). I think Mac OS X will see a major increase in the amount of open source development, especially since a large portion of the OS is open source.
If you're interested in evangelizing open source to Mac developers, perhaps you should start with the one major open source success story on the Mac platform - John Norstad's NewsWatcher.
Since John Norstad released the code to NewsWatcher under a very permissive (BSD-like) license, it spawned a long list of feature-enhanced derivatives: YA-NewsWatcher, MT-NewsWatcher, WS-NewsWatcher, Value-Added NewsWatcher.
(And NewsWatcher and its derivatives are still the best news readers on any platform. Nothing compares on Unix or Win32.)
--
Let's say that you're correct, and that in general, there is far more money to be made in Mac software. Does this even more so raise the barier of entry to open source software on the Mac?
Jason McIntosh has created a catalog of Mac open source software boasting 149 titles, which I consider pretty impressive for a platform usually considered barren of open source.
--ianAs an attendee of MacHack for several years, I would not take the tension between Eric Raymond and several other other attendees to reflect all Macintosh developers in general. Eric made many points, which everyone agreed with, but when it came to discussing the economics of open-source vs. closed-source proprietary applications, people questioned whether Eric defend his views in the marketplace.
The Macintosh community is on the verge of a transition from the old MacOS 9 to the new Mac OS 10 (X), which is unix based, but developers are just now getting their hands on the API's released at WWDC. When MacOSX is shipped with new machines, beginning early next year, probably January, I expect that many apps on MacOS9 will be "carbonized", so they will run well with the new OS. So far, Apple has placed OS Core, Darwin, under open-source licensing, and has a team of 4 people overseeing the project.
I would expect that other projects, e.g. web browsers, will be ripe for open-source, but remember that Apple will still use a lot of proprietary graphic libraries, from Quartz to Quicktime. In addition, much of the NextStep frameworks will be available via the Cocoa libraries, but be prepared to learn Objective-C
in order to use it.
Unfortunately, it looks like that C++ will not have an open framework available, outside of Metrowerks's PowerPlant. Most new apps will be written in Java or Objective C if they use Cocoa, and will use the Carbon frameworks, if they use C++.
I expect the transition to MacOS X and Unix will take at least 3-6 months for most conventional apps, although the effort to make a Carbon app will be less than expected. If open - source projects want to be successful, they need to mobilize their resources quickly, and work effectively with user groups.
As for tools, most of Apple's tools are based on gcc, and the other GNU tools, with GUI based IDE tools built along side. If you to get involved, sign up for a Select developer membership, sign your NDA for now, and apple will get you all the tools you need to get started. Codewarrior remains an important tool for Mac, but Visual Studio has very little value on the present or future platform.
The advice I have is to remember the golden Rule when dealing with other developers, as everyone has mouths to feed and bills to pay.
I have a little site that lists, describes, and links to a bunch of open-source projects available for the current MacOS. Starting the site and getting it linked from Macintouch was all it took for me to contribute my little bit of open source advocacy to the Mac community, and I strongly recommend similar routes for people with messages of their own. It's easier than you may think.
In the year I've been maintaining the site I've received enough feedback from people to convince me that open-source projects have as much of a place in closed-source OSes as open ones. It's all good.
J
MacOS Open Source
jmac
The average Mac user does dink around with his/her box once and a while, but the environment is not suited for real tweaking (yet - OS X looks sweet [except for it being COMMERCIAL :{ ]). The *NIX world is built around tweaking -- using perl and shell scripts for EVERYTHING, for example. The glut of STANDARD (and usually free) tools has made "programming" (even with shell scripts and piping stuff through grep) a fact of day to day life. Mac users live in a static desktop world where Apple has placed simplicity / ease of use over power in many cases (not that Macs aren't good machines - I like 'em). The point I'm trying to make is -- Mac users are fairly apathetic about their desktop experience. It has changed very little (in comparision to desktops on Windows and UNIX machines) since its conception -- honestly its a pretty good design for novices. Mac users don't expect to change the way things work. (Now I'm referring to the Evangelista-types without trying to avoid using a cult metaphor so this doesn't get modded down as flamebait) They assume that Apple has their best interests in mind.
There. See If I made ANY sense.
The reason, as I see it, that open source thrives on linux is because a large proportion of the linux community are coders. Certainly we aint all kernel hackers but most people can tweak bash and perl scripts to get them running.
:) and even still dont know very much about how it works. Sure I can knock up simple stuff in RealBasic and i've played with Microsoft Basic for Macintosh from the outset, but I still dont fancy coding anything complex on it. Added to that before an ordinary Mac user will accept open source software it'll have to be a fully graphical application... I used to hate it when things ran in a console like window.
:)
I've only been using linux a lot for under a year now and already I have been required to learn quite a lot about how it works, just to make it work. As such i'm in a far better position to write or contribute to open source.
On the other hand I've been using macs since 1986 (age 6
The requirement of having a graphical OS must surely push up development times, and costs, and hence make open source less attractive.
Added to this, mac users are used to paying over the odds for their hardware and many dont mind paying for software too.
Computers seem to be something of a trade off between cost and ease of use.
Macs are comparatively expensive but at age 8 I could upgrade the operating system in total confidence.
It took me another 3 years to feel happy doing that with a PC, yet it took me til age 18 until I could fully configure and recompile the linux kernel.
However having said all that, I expect that the advent of OsX will make it easier to port existing linux/bsd software to this platform and by then any coders still left on the mac platform (sorry guys but my Powerbook 100 is getting a bit dusty) will be able to add cutesy aqua interfaces and it'll all be good
Seriously... as a Mac fan and LinuxPPC user myself, I've noticed that Apple, these last couple of years is getting more respect... especially from the part of the geek community who usually would have, a few years ago, dismissed Macs as toys.
And I think that OS X is a big part of this. Aqua "gooiness" (all defined in editable XML files... first thing I'll do is put the widgets back where they're supposed to be... to hell with the "traffic light" model) aside... OS X really IS the first attempt to market a Unix OS to mass consumers. And I, for one, am definately fascinated to see how it turns out... if it will REALLY be so easy to use that you'll NEVER have to see the command line if you don't WANT to. I'm doublely impressed that the command line WILL be available when I WANT it...
Choice, as they say, is good.
And we'll have perl, gcc, java and all the other "traditional" development tools, PLUS some pretty nifty stuff from NeXT... projectbuilder and the "bundle" application model!!! Cool stuff, I would say... it sure looks like OS X is gonna be very "hackable".
Add to that the fact that, with the rise of Linux, and the forituitous actions of the DOJ, microsoft is rapidly losing its credibility in the "windows r00l3zzz apple dr001ez unix bl0wz" FUD department. And, as such, gates is losing it's ability to propagate his ever-so-popular "anyone who has ever used a Mac is an idiot" propaganda.
It's also worth noting that Apple is becoming (albiet, slowly) more and more "open"... Darwin is open, Quicktime server is open, OS X reportedly does not require the infamous boot ROM.... (tho I don't know if the Darwin liscense meets RMS's strict standards... but then who appointed him open source God? I like ESR's fork of open source philosophy better myself).
Indeed, when Apple was "Steve and Steve", they were "open source" fifteen years BEFORE Linux and the popularity of open source Unix-like OSs. The Apple II used to come with complete schematics (good enough that you could use them to build your own Apple II from parts), commented assembly for the ROMs and a disassembler in case there were undocumented changes!!! And Woz freely gave out schematics to all of his designs to anyone who asked. But then came the suits...
(I find it particular ironic that Be whines about Apple not giving them the G* specs (FUD anyway, they're available from Motorola (enjoying that intel money jean?)), when it was jean louis gassee who, after being insturmental in the expulsion of the Steves, was the biggest OPPONENT of Apple licensing its technology)
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
Maybe forget about the geeks and concentrate on Joe Average user. Let him get dependent on some program that runs under MacOS 7/8/9 and then for some reason breaks under MacOS X (not that far fetched, considering how different X is from 7/8/9). When he can't get it fixed because the vendor is out of business, or the vendor wants to charge him an arm and a leg for an "upgrade" that doesn't have any extra functionality (except that it works under MacOS X) then perhaps that user will begin to understand the value of having source.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I think that one of the major things holding back opensource development on Mac is the lack of readily available _free_ compilers. Sure there's Apple's MPW but it doesn't come standard with the MacOS. How can you expect your users to download the 21 megs worth of MPW just to compile your software. I don't mind downloading source for an application under linux because it's simply:
> tar xvfz sourcefile.tar.gz
> cd sourcefile/
>
Simply because I already have gcc installed with my distro. However, under MacOS it's a much larger headache - especially if the user doesn't have MPW (which is 98% of Mac users anyway). Just my $0.02
(If you're thinking of whining about those changes are not integrated with mainline GCC, complain to me personally instead; fully 1/2 of my hours for Apple are now allocated to preparing GCC patches to send to the FSF...)
So why *is* open source not more popular on Macs? I think it's the same reason there's not so much on Windows either; it's more work to develop programs than for a Unix variant, there is a large end-user base that just wants binaries and is often willing to pay for them, and there is a relatively stable ABI, so there are fewer reasons to need sources for the purposes of recompiling.
I expect to see some change when OS X comes out, because there is now more awareness of the other benefits of open source, and porting Unix apps is pretty easy (I've done some myself), but I expect it will be a gradual transition as OS X expands its installed base.
Stan Shebs
shebs@apple.com
>and feel is copyrigted"-approach.
Not that he doesn't mesn well, I'm sure that he does. But it seems like RMS gets so wraped up in the "all software must be free" aspect of his philosophy that he ignores the "big picture".
Remember who Apple was struggleing against in that suit? If Apple had won, it's quite possible that windows would have been stillborn. Think about it... a world with no "gates in a sweater" commercials, no win95/98/2000 hype, no outlook viruses, no explorer integrated into windows, no ability to "embrace, extend, and extinguish", no halloween papers, no ability to steal the work of any potential competitor and call it his own, and possibly, even no microsoft at all!!!
Imagine where the computer world would be, were gates not holding us back. Where would we be if he did not have the monopoly power to supress any superior technology that might compete with one of his own offerings?
There's and old saying that RMS might want to look up... "The enemy of the enemy is your friend".
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
For some reason, many (maybe even most) of the people writing code for the Macintosh have the idea that they deserve to be paid -- that being rewarded by enthusiastic users thanking them and saying nice things about them is not enough. Although there are some wonderful shareware programs for the Mac that are worth every cent their authors charge and more, there are also many tiny programs whose authors demand US$5-$15 that would be given away for free without a second thought by Unix hackers.
In discussions I've had about why this might be, my friends and I have generally come to the conclusion that because the Macintosh has always been sold as a ``premium'' platform (Macs cost more than roughly comparable PCs, and have traditionally been marketed to appeal to people who want to believe they're ``better'' than the average person), combined with the fact that the Macintosh user community has tended to be less hands-on technically adept, may have created a user community that equates money with quality, and so expects to pay for a quality tool, no matter how trivial. (The Macintosh user community tends to be stereotyped as incompetent and technically ignorant -- in fact, most Mac users just want to concentrate on their work and not on the tools they use to do their work. If they have to pay attention to their tools, they're being distracted from their goals.)
It's also possible that programming the Macintosh is such a chore that Mac programmers do much less of the kind of ``scratch-my-own-itch hacking'' (``I have a problem I need to solve for myself. Hack, hack, hack. Done! Gee, now that I've solved it, I bet other people might interested in this code, too!'') that we see in the open source community. Because the Macintosh presents a polished, closed interface, Mac users don't have the ``gateway drug'' experience Unix users have with the shell: learning how to use shell commands, then learning to assemble those commands into pipelines, writing simple scripts, and then, perhaps, learning to write more complicated programs in languages such as Perl, Python, and C. (Apple provides AppleScript, and people can and have built fairly complicated workflow solutions using AppleScript, but most Mac users never find a need to justify purchasing or printing out the thick manual and learning the language. Even if they did, many Mac applications support only the most basic set of (required) AppleScript commands, making them essentially unscriptable.)
It may be (and we can hope) that MacOS X, with its Unix underpinnings, will allow the world of free (as in both beer and speech) software to penetrate the Macintosh world in a way it never could before. If people can download the vast library of free and open source tools and put them to use (either as compilable source code or as MacOS X installer packages), then shareware that handles the same tasks but can't be modified for a user's specific needs might take a beating, provided that the quality is there.
However, GPL'd utilities such as bash, gzip, gnutar, gcc, etc. can be bundled with the operating system, as long as it's clear that they're not part of the operating system.
Apple Legal is actually being very careful about not breaking the GPL, from what I hear.
--
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
With all due respect. Myst is great and all, but I could envision putting that together in hypercard much more than I could say... Quake. All in all, I love hypercard (believe it or not, I've written a lot in it, even fairly complex programs. Still, there will be A HIT. I'm not for ANY sacrifice when processor time is essential.
Eh...
To learn more about OS X porting, look at Apple's developer pages, mail me, or get on macosx-dev@omnigroup.com, which has a lot of useful discussion.
Stan Shebs
shebs@apple.com
This has always been my theory on why there is so little Mac open source. Specifically, if you've invested the time and effort to learn to program a Mac, the ease with which you can obtain a commanding marketshare makes it quite tempting to take any and every piece of Mac software commercial.
I wrote the MacHTTP web server in my spare time in early 1993. It was originally given away for free and most of the source code was easily obtained as well. But as time went on, the increasing demands on my time, the addition of significant features, and the market demand for the software made it a certainty that the product would become commercial.
After a year of free distribution, it became a shareware product (the first "commercial" web server on the Internet). After a year, the product was making over $250,000 a quarter as shareware and turning it into a commercial product (WebSTAR) was a no-brainer. StarNine turned that into a $15M run rate and 98% market share in 6 months.
From the perspective of even the most altruistic of developers, passing up that kind of cash is hard. In the context of the Mac marketplace, where good software is rewarded with high margins, high purchase rates, and loyal users, it's impossible to pass up. I think all the really good Mac programmers are just too busy making money at it to do open source justice on the Mac platform.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Steve is a real visionary. I've read about him, and seen a lot of his stuff. I might not know him personally, but if there was someone that I would want to work with for a few days, it would be him. He might not have been popular with a few people (fired from Apple), but man, NEXT was really... good. I'm glad he's back with Apple. Now, the fruit flavored macs might be aimed at a different kind of user, but I can see the concept and the marketting. Other stuff that Apple is doing is real great, we just get hung up on some of the stuff that they do that we consider to be "goofy shit" and the relatively aggressive stance that they take with their platform (usually).
Eh...
right but its window dressing basically.
The book assumes you already know how to program in C, but know nothing about the details of the Macintosh API. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get started writing open-source software for the Mac.
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
Well, if nobody else ever said "thank you" for writing MacHTTP, then consider yourself thanked.
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
But the other reason is because starting off as a developer in the Mac community was very difficult. Open-sourcing my programs may help others get started (i hope). It is not easy piecing together all of the information necessary from the various Mac programming web-sites that offer useful advice (of which there are few), and at the same time trying to wade through the Windows/Linux specific information that is all too easy to find.
What is needed is a web site aimed at Mac users interested in learning to program. If an experienced Mac developer would collect information on compilers/APIs etc. and show how rewarding programming can be, it would be a good investment for the future of the Mac programming community.
If you have ever compared a general Mac magazine to a Windows one, you will notice a huge difference in the content. Mac magazines continually contain Photoshop tutorials, beginners guides and other less-technical issues. On the other hand, PC magazines cover almost every computer-related issue, from the basics right through to programming with languages like C and Perl.
What I am getting at is that the average Mac user never comes across programming. I'm not calling them ignorant, its just that no-one ever shows them the joys of staying up all night in front of a monitor, staring at lines of code. And I wish someone would do something about it.
I forget where, but I got the source to part or all of Gerry's ICQ... If you want it, email me and I'll see if I can dig it up. It's probably not big-O Open Source, but it's free, and the source is out there.
The Mac market is a strange bird. The way it's been treated, it's no surprise.
;-)
Here are some of my thoughts on the matter, in no particular order.
Like other posters have pointed out, Mac programming has a high barrier to entry: the Toolbox. It's powerful as anything, with upwards of 5,000 subroutines in it. When was the last time you thought, "I feel like cranking out a program. I'll just refresh my memory on the 5,000 most common system calls and hit the keys!" Compare it to the difficulty of becoming a Perl master, times 10. "Hello world" is about a 15-line program unless you use a special STDIO runtime library.
Source code has never been an issue. I've played with Macs for over 10 years and never had any trouble getting working source code to learn from. Documentation, on the other hand, wasn't always as easy as it is today.
One important social issue to remember is that the Free Software Foundation snubbed Mac users pretty hard. How long did that silly boycott last? That always seemed awfully hypocritical to me, since FSF programs have always been supported on other platforms that are just as closed and proprietary as Mac: HPUX, SunOS, DOS, etc.
It's really amazing how the attitude toward the Mac has been poisoned in the PC and Unix communities. I think it all derives from one simple premise: DOS and Unix users between 1984 and 1995 were perpetually sick with envy and too stubborn to admit it. It's all sour grapes.
I honestly can't imagine anyone giving the Mac a fair, open-minded try for a couple of months and not concluding that it is, in many ways, still years ahead of everything else (even though the kernel lags). Some of its features are amazingly slick. Aliases, for example, are much smarter than Shortcuts or symbolic links.
Also like other posters have mentioned, a lot of the grassroots Mac development took place in Hypercard, not something likely to catch the attention of the rest of the world. I prefer to do my Mac hacking in MacPerl nowadays; AppleScript I mostly ignore.
Finally, I'd like to try (once again, in vain) to put to rest the twin myths of software drought and overpriced hardware.
In over 10 years of using the Mac, I don't think I've ever been forced to do something on a PC or Unix because there was no software to do it on the Mac. I may have done it if I couldn't find appropriate free software, but there was always something. The Mac shareware and freeware communities have produced a steady stream of high-quality apps. Some are so good I have used them daily for over 6 years. On the commercial side, there are over 25,000 shipping applications. This is not exactly what I think of as a platform bereft of runnable code. Maybe you're thinking of Minix.
Finally, I have yet to be convinced that Macs below the top-of-the-line have been significantly overpriced in the past 5+ years. I keep pretty close tabs on current Mac and PC prices, and low- and mid-range Macs don't cost much more equivalent PCs -- in fact, they often cost LESS than an equivalent PC from a first-class maker like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, Sony, HP, or IBM. It doesn't bother me that Apple charges an extra $1000 for that last 50 MHz; the top-of-the-line should be the high-profit-margin gravy. I want the guys with all the bucks to subsidize my mid-level machine!
I can understand how the can licence distribution of binaries (since they include proprietary library code), but what legal justification od they have to prohibit the distribution of source code? Is there "wizard" based or other generated code which includes copyrighted material? And if so can you get around it by using the compiler only to compile code which is 100% open source?
They may quite reasonably prohibit the distribution of header files and generated code. Beyond that I doubt they have any right to restrict your code.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
cool.. I'll change my finder icon to the dogcow. and.... make apple+delete eject disks
hypercard is kinda cool though...
what can you REALLY do though?
The term "open source" needs clarification. In practice, this means that the developer of software makes the source code available under a license similar to GPL or the BSD artistic license. This is a good thing, because it means you can make fixes or changes if you become desperate, and there's always the possibility of someone else picking up the project should the original developer(s) lose interest. Or someone could use the source as a basis for another project. And so on.
But let's stop fooling ourselves into thinking that open source means better and faster development. The best software is still developed by focused groups of people who are following their original vision. Add too many people and you get design by committee. There aren't good examples of non-system software that has benefited from OS. Perl, the Linux kernel, apache, and sendmail are the usual examples that get trotted out, just like fraternities trot out the "We do charity work!" line each time they get nailed for hazing or drunkeness. The bottom line is that just having the source code freely available (as in speech) does not make for open source development. That's something different altogether.
"Open Source" means that the source code is freely available. "Open Source Development" means "development by people who are making the source code publicly available." ESR would have you believe that all the work is being done by people who happen across the source and add major features, which is far from the truth.
Because mac users actually expect quality software that just works, with no configuration hassles. That aesthetic informs all [good] MacOS developers.
Open-source, when you get away from the hype, is basically a cabal of *nix developers, who tend to be willing to jump through all kinds of hoops to get things done. MacOS users, though, earn $$ from their Macs, and lose $$ when they have to mess with config crap. When you're billing $400/hr, the last thing you want to do is tweak that annoying config file with the option that you read about 2 years ago and isn't in the man page.
Sofware that's too hard to use = lost time, and time in the Mac world is more valuable than it is in other worlds. If your product doesn't save users time, they won't use it.
"Welcome to the Real World."
And, just to whip it out, I've configured virtual domains in apache, used perl and shell on 4 *nices enough to hate it, and wondered why the dumb gnu configure script doesn't stash its info in a repository so it doens't have to look for it over and over and over every time you compile another tarball of stuff. I've forgotten more *nix system administration that I ever wanted to know, and I believe that compared to a real *nix like AIX or Solaris, Linux is 2-4 years off-the-ball. And yes, I do use smit(ty).
--- only for the squeamish
I am doing a talk at the Perl Conference later this month called "How to Be Really Cool Using MacPerl" that will show some of the stuff I use. What do you want done? Lemme know, I'll whip up a script for you. :-)
Let's see how Bill treats droplets: If you compile an ANSI C program to run in DOS or Windows, the shell treats a droplet. When you drag a document onto an app (or a shortcut thereto), the shell launches the app with the document's path as the first arg.
Now how Steve does it: When a droplet is started, it is sent an "Apple event" of type aevt.odoc (open document) that gives the path to the document dropped onto it. If a C library were to translate an `odoc' event into argv[] and additional `odoc' events into fork()/exec(), that would fit in just fine.
I've seen this in products such as Prograph and Widget Workshop.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I used to develop for the Mac, but gave it up when Copland didn't ship.
That doesn't make any sense. Some of the best advocates of free software are Mac users. True, it is rare to find a Mac user who is religious about the issue, like RMS is, but that has nothing to do with "believing" in free software.
People who use Mac OS use it because it has the best graphical user interface around. If you offered "use KDE with a Mac OS theme" as a serious suggestion, then you don't understand user interfaces at all. Having widgets that look a certain way are only about 10 percent of what makes a UI. No user who relies on the great Mac OS interface could possibly be satisfied with KDE.
The Apple 'open-source' license isn't free, and as such running Mac OS is out of the question.
That is false AND it doesn't make sense. Perens and the OSI says it is a free license. Maybe RMS doesn't; I personally couldn't care less what RMS says, since he is often wrong.
And even if the APSL were not "free," what would that have to do with Mac OS? Neither Mac OS nor Mac OS X are licensed under the APSL.