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Apple OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard

Posted by chrisd on from the office-ain't-done-till-bsd-won't-run dept.

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.

3 of 422 comments (clear)

  1. had to beg for a job? by CommanderTaco · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  2. Re:Welcome to the real world. by TheAJofOZ · · Score: 5, Interesting
    No, NO, NO! Trademarks are lost if they aren't defended, not copyright. Is this really such a difficult distinction for Slashdot readers to make?

    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:

    • Mac OS X - Darwin is opensource.
    • QuickTime - The QuickTime format has been open for quite some time (the Sorensen codec is a third party extension which Apple is kind enough to pay for and distribute to you free of charge). Then there's Darwin Streaming Server which just happens to be fully opensource.
    • Java - Yep, Apple is now leading the way in Java and rolling their new features back into Sun's codebase (as required by Sun's licencing terms).
    • Firewire - Err, IEEE1394, 'nuff said.
    • USB - Invented by a consortium, popularised by Apple, well known standard.
    • PPC chip - Shared technology between Motorola, Apple and IBM (yes Apple helps in the development of it)
    • SDRAM, IDE, SCSI, VGA, PCI and AGP - All words you find in PC computer stores.
    • Airport - aka: 802.11b another international standard popularised by Apple.
    • PDF - Used heavily throughout OS X, and while I believe their are patents/restrictions of some kind on it (it's owned and controlled by Adobe not Apple), it is the default standard for sharing non-editable files.

    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.

  3. Developer Tools: A Quiet Revolution by hiendohar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.