Darwin Team Answers & Develop on Darwin

Lagos writes "In July Darwin developers at Apple had a call for questions. Their answers were posted on Monday and may be found here. There is some discussion of Apple's place within the Open Source community, though most of the questions answered are more technical." Along the same Darwinian lines, this submission came in: Maktoo writes "Maccentral is reporting that SourceForge.net has added PowerMac G4 Servers running MacOS X 10.1 into their Compile Farm. Now any apps you have going on SourceForge, you can test to see if it'll run on OS X! Gotta love that BSD heritage... OS X is already going to benefit greatly from all the apps it can use in the UNIX/Linux space. This just makes life easier for developers to bring even more."

Comments

Question of the day...

[gergi]

Many people complain about Linux not being user-friendly enough in the GUI. Whether that is true or not is irrevelant to my question. Near everyone can agree that Apple has the best GUI. We're talking about how easy it is to port *BSD/Linux apps to OS X ... how easy do you think it would be for Apple to port Aqua to *BSD/Linux?

-As beautiful as KDE is, I would drop it in a heartbeat for Aqua.

Potential danger

[nahdude812]

I'm sorry if this is seen as flamebait, but isn't anyone else concerned that potentially all apps that run under Linux would migrate their way to another (commercial) OS with marketing power, and a desire to influence it? Couldn't this be a real threat to Linux? What if everything that ran under Linux suddenly started working under Windows? Wouldn't that reduce the marketability of Linux? If I were a corporation considering switching to a different environment, all be it a more stable one, when I only have people on staff who know the current environment, might I not be inclined to stay with the current environment given that the tools from the new one were available within the current one? Immediate costs would be reduced as there's less of a rollout, even if licensing in the long run is more expensive.

I think it's a great testament to Open Source that Apple chose to heavily base their OS on it; Apple decision makers aren't idiots, they know a good thing when they see it. But in the end, it takes a piece of the market owned wholly by *nices and allows a commercial entity to have a share of it.

Re:Potential danger

[dolanh]

As of right now I don't see too much of a conflict, considering the products that MacOSX is encroaching upon are mostly positioned at the desktop market, whereas BSD/Linux main strength is still primarily on the server end.

When BSD/Linux gets a stronger desktop following (I give it about two years), we could revisit your argument.

Re:Simple Clarification Needed...

[iso]

Photoshop is major $$$. Why do you think so many Mac users have been interested in a GIMP port?

Well photoshop is available to students for only about $200, which is how I first bought it years ago. Anybody who isn't a student will have a job and therefor money, but even then one can still find photoshop for about $500, sometimes less if you pick up an older version and upgrade.

Add to all this the fact that the GIMP is useless for print, and if you're not doing print then you'd be better off buying Photoshop Elements for a mere $99. There are even upgrade programs to buy Photoshop Elements for as low as $70 if you have a copy of Photoshop LE (included with many scanners, and I've even seen it included free with magazines and at tradeshows!)

It should also be noted that while I've seen many Mac users interested in the GIMP (hey, everybody likes free stuff), I've run into exactly zero who were impressed by it when they finally got it running. The GIMP is a nice idea, but despite what many (ignorant) zealots preach, the GIMP does not, in any way shape or form, come close to the power of Photoshop Elements, nevermind Photoshop.

- j