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The Cathedral And The Bizarre
Euro writes: "Jeff Lewis has written
an interesting article for
macopinion.com that discusses why Open Source hasn't taken off that well among the Mac enthusiasts. Interesting reading, as well as some excellent commentary on why the Bazaar development model isn't always a great idea." (timothy butts in: You might also want to revisit the recent Ask Slashdot about promoting Open Source on the Mac.)
Since Apple products are the monolithic beasts they are, I think they actually inspire more curiosity. Ever since ResEdit and MacsBug were written, neophites have been introducing themselves to the wonderful world of OS hacking. One early example that comes to mind is the classic shareware game, "Spaceward, Ho!". It lacked a few keyboard shortcuts that some people wanted... a quick edit of the resource fork, and viola! Command-T suddenly advances the turn. The new keystroke even shows up on the right side of the menu option, just like in all other MacOS keystroke options. Make one minor change like this to one program and you get sucked in.
Hardware is also tinkered with. The original iMac had a "Mezzanene" slot on the mobo (left over from when that board was meant to become a thin client). A clever German company saw it as a potential unsupported PDS slot to make up for the lack of PCI expansion. They made a combo card of video-out and SCSI.
Mac hacking is possible, you just need to know the platform. Since most hackers cut their eyeteeth on x86 boxes, a lot of the Apple world seems strange and impenetrable, but it's not so bad once you learn it. For example, the LinuxPPC group had an iMac port within weeks of the release, USB support and all.
Okay, okay... enough cheerleading. I'll stop now.
The story was interesting, and almost as one-sided as ESR's speech. It would be cool to get JL and ESR on a debate panel together. (After they each make a quick pass through a metal detector. No need for bloodshed.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Because, in terms of openness, Mac is to Windows as Windows is to Linux.
No really--the hood is almost literally welded shut on every Mac. This style of computer doesn't breed much curiosity in the user, so Open Source is unlikely to interest them. That doesn't mean they couldn't benefit from it, it just means that the two groups don't have much overlap.
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There's something strange about writing Open Source software on a platform when the development tools are Closed Source. It's kind of hard to write Open Source in Microsoft Visual C++, and it's also kind of hard to do it in Metrowerks Codewarrior. Why? You obviously paid for those tools - and so you don't necessarily want to give it away for free. With MacOSX, the development tools are now free, both as in beer an in speech. It makes it much easier to develop Open source applications.
Secondly, there just wasn't enough Open Source software to leverage on the MacOS environment. Most free software on Linux is built around free libraries, and couldn't exist without them. On MacOS (pre-X), there weren't enough free software libraries available. On MacOSX, the BSD subsystem garuntees easy ports of libraries like guile and glib, upon which many applications depends.
It's quite probable that when MacOS X arrives, there'll be an outpouring of Open Source software just for those reasons. Once some of the GNU libraries are ported, people will start to use them - and Open Source what they create.
An opinion from a Mac guy:
Most of the Mac people I know are artists, musicians and designers. In other words, not programmers. This is Apple's main market, and these folks probably couldn't care less about whether or not their programs have source code because they wouldn't know what to do with it even if it was available.
Me? I'm in with them: an HTML and graphics guy. I'm not a programmer by trade, but am enthusiastic about the Open Source movement as a whole. I have PHP3 installed on my server and will eventually figure it out because I want to make better Web pages. I'm also really looking forward to OS X to see what things like Apache will do for me.
I've used my share of OSes and platforms, and the current MacOS does what I want to right now. In the future, this may change, but I like what I have.
The general rancour I've seen from the so-called 'Open Source' community against people who aren't programmers will hardly lead the masses to the cause.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Wow.
/. community) want everything to be open, RMS (and another huge group of /.ers) want everything to be Free. The real world is far more nuanced than that, for better or for worse.
Finally, a lucid explanation of how the Open Source model isn't necessarily the best development model all of the time. It generally makes a lot of sense, and there are a lot of things it's well-suited to, but the points made in this article are valid and real.
Commercial software is typically designed for the simple purpose of making money. Not to make the world a better place, and not to do "something cool for the community" in order to satisfy egos. It's written to provide a useful program that pays the salaries of the people involved. Sure, there's exceptions, but that's the basic gist of it.
That said, what Apple has done is finally come up with a model by which they can exchange something with the community (Darwin), and yet maintain what they feel is their proprietary asset (the consistency of the Mac UI "experience" so they can sell more Macs and make more money for the employees and stockholders. Even though I'd like a little more from them, I'll settle for this. I have Apple stock - I don't want anybody to be able to make a Mac (which is possible when it's all open), but I do want people to be able to take advantage of some of the cool stuff Apple's done to improve other products and systems. It's a decent compromise.
Not every program benefits from Open Source, either, though many do. I love Bungie and Id's giving away old game code to help jumpstart programmers and projects, but you don't see any of them opening up their latest and greatest engines, either. That's because the latest engine is something they can earn money licensing - they leave money on the table if they give the latest stuff away. But at least they share something, if not everything. Corel Linux may be open, but Corel WordPerfect isn't, and never will be, I bet. Companies need revenue somewhere, and unless you're in the systems support business, if you give away razors you need to be able to sell blades. The only reallt open commercial office suite, for instance, is StarOffice. But Sun isn't using StarOffice to make money - they're using it to try and sell Sun equipment and they're giving it away because it may help them towards that goal and because Scott McNealy has a personal vendetta against Bill Gates (but who doesn't?). StarOffice is a razor, and Sun workstations and servers (and their little bitty SunRays) are the blades in this scenario.
I think that the Mac overall will do just fine with no more Open Source contact than they have right now - but I would like to see more. Some programs will benefit from being opened, some will not. People like ESR (and a lot of the
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Bowie, for every one open source developer that gives into greed, or sells out, or whatever you predict happens, there will be several more to replace him/her. The movement is growing, not just on the corporate end of things, every time I turn around there is another OSS project begining. Yes, many of them will fail and disappear, but with all the devlopers moving to Linux daily, how can you begin predicting the end while everything is growing?
If Linux fails COMPLETLY on the commerical front, who cares? RHAT, LNUX, Corel, they cal all disappear and it wouldn't affect the community that much. We already have a usable base of software and many of us have invested years of "fun" into devloping programs for Linux, those people wont stop.
Perhaps I get a little riled up when people judge Linux's success and future by corporate standards, but let's face it, we were here before the Linux commercialism and we will be here after it. I personally could care less about how Linux stocks are doing, I care about how my server is doing. That's MY movitation, and many others like me. If you believe that OSS will die if the corporate support vanishes, then you must not realise that OSS existed before RedHat and VA.
Finkployd