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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard
We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.
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Well, as one who runs multiple platforms and multiple os' thereon, I must say i have found it to be extrodinary. I have 3 pc boxes running some combination of 4 or 5 os' and 2 TiBooks and an imac running OSX10.1.
I am, as a direct result of OSX, dumping all but one of the pc boxes completely (and adding a new G4 Tower (need that DVD burner)). I'll keep one just to have a strong box to run the occasional game *not* emulated (for obvious reasons). I have no need for the others any more...quite frankly, OSX simply runs rings around the vast majority of what is out there for day to day use blended with abject power.
Just great...and way to much fun to play with....
/rootrot
seems hard to believe that he had to struggle to land the job at Apple, as such a prominent OS developer. I would have thought that the more successful/visible open source developers would have their pick of jobs at any firm... and Hubbard would be especially well suited to work on OSX, since it's based on freebsd. i bet he's just being modest...
I'm a diehard Linux geek, and I find OS X quite to my liking.
I recently bought an iBook with OS X. At first it was meant primarily to be a secondary console, and an experiment in the Macintosh world. But recently I've found myself using OS X for more and more of my daily computing.
OS X is not without its flaws; the package system stinks, the X server (XFree86 port actually) is a little slow, and porting applications can be a bit of an inconvenience, but the environment is pleasant to use, and the underlying UNIX system is easily accessible.
After installing bash, XFree86 (XDarwin), GTK+, GIMP, and XEmacs, OS X leaves little to be desired.
OS X goes all out with antialiasing; almost all fonts rendering is antialiased, which makes Web surfing and document reading much more pleasant. The graphics system certainly takes a toll on the system's performance, but in my opinion it's worth it.
Please do not judge OS X from versions prior to 10.1. 10.0's performance was horrible. It has gotten much faster.
Apple: PLEASE bring back springloaded folders -- OS X needs them!
-John
Well actually, in Australia at least (and presumably in the US) we have this little law against selective punishment which states that if you are to take legal action against someone you must also take legal action against any other infrignement of the same magnitude against the right you are protecting. In other words, if you regularly let people you don't know walk through your property as a short cut then you cannot sue a specific person for taking the same short cut without showing that you are also going to persecute all future infringements. Otherwise the legal action is discriminatory and will be thrown out of court (see the case of Williams vs Thorsbourne in relation to the Port Hinchinbrook Project). Apply this to copyrights and you will find that they are only viable to the extent that they are protected.
Now, even if this law does not exist in America, the fact that it does in Australia would be enough to convince most international companies to be strict about enforcing their trademarks to save trouble in the long run. Of course, ianal...
Regardless of all this, Apple is certainly not a highly proprietary company any more. Lets take a look at some of the things they work with and sell these days and how open they are:
In fact there is very little that Apple do that is proprietary anymore. So they defend their look and feel vigourously because that's about the biggest thing that sets them apart from what others could provide. Almost everything else they do is opensource or follows widely published standards.
All in all, Apple looks like a pretty good place for an opensource advocate to find a home.
I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a skunk works somewhere inside apple with this already being worked on, but not because Apple is all of the sudden going to become a software company.
Apparently Jobs was mighty pissed at Motorola because the PowerPC chips weren't scaling (in terms of Mzh) as quickly as the x86 machines. There were rumors that if things continued at that rate that Apple would switch its machines over to an x86 arch. (with maybe Transmetta for laptops). Now, assuming that was true I wouldn't have expected the new systems to have been standard x86 machines. I would suspect they would have been incompatible with WinTel boxen. Apple is a hardware/software company and would want to control the hardware platform as well.
Since it looks like Motorola has solved some of the speed issues (the new G5s are supposed to be blazing if the Reg is to be believed) I doubt any x86 port of aqua would ever see the light of day.
One aspect of OS X that seems to have gone largely underreported is the decision to distribute developer tools with the operating system. The developer tools include the Project Builder IDE and Interface Builder GUI constructor, as well as gcc, gdb, cvs, make, perl, and the Java JDK.
The integration with Java is alone remarkable; full Cocoa bindings means that your Java applications are no-less "mac-like" than apps implemented in c/c++/objective-c. The file-bundle structure (executables are packaged in hierarchical directories with resources and XML files providing metadata) completes the encapsulation: a Java app looks and launches just like any other.
On the other hand, you can double-click ".jar" files, and programs that use AWT or Swing, and run them as well.
Providing the facility to write first class programs "out of the box" is an important, if unheralded, aspect of Apple's "open" philosophy. It's a form of user empowerment. It may not go far enough to please the proponents of some open source ideologies, but for the great majority of personal computer users it represents more freedom than they know what to do with. I think it could have a significant effect in introducing people to programing. IANA Windows programmer, but my impression is that the barrier to entry is considerably higher.