Apple Announces Open Source Design Award

Pzykotic writes: "Apple today announced a new category to their yearly Apple Design Awards: 'Best Mac OS X Open Source Port' for individuals or collaborations. The winners will be announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California, during the week of this May 6-10. Winners receive an 'Ultimate' (Dual 1 GHz/GeForce4 TI/DVD-R/etc) Power Mac G4 system with an Apple Cinema Display."

Comments

Think Apple is pricey, win one

[DebianDog]

All you coders always bitching you can't or won't affords and Apple, here is your chance to get one for free. Top of the line.

Go get yourself an old iMac on eBay or something. All the development software is free and if you do not win, at least you will have a machine to run a "free" streaming server from. And yes, there is source code avaliable for Darwin.

Now, get busy you have till April 5th to do a simple port.

The right direction

[elliotj]

I don't know that the award will really make much of a difference to people porting software, but this kind of encouragement is exactly what the Mac needs. If the Mac can really use all the open source software that is out there for BSD and Linux (and by use it, I mean have it ported to work well w/ Aqua and install easily), then the Mac will become even more compelling. And consumers will notice the difference. If they buy a Mac they are a download away from thousands of programs and utilities. With a PC, there may be more software in the stores, but they'll have to pay for each version.

Re:The right direction

[bsartist]

by use it, I mean have it ported to work well w/ Aqua and install easily

You've hit the nail on the head here. Simply compiling and packaging standard command line or X software is not the same as porting it to OS/X. Don't get me wrong - I have a huge amount of respect for the people porting XFree, the people behind fink, and all the others who are supporting Darwin. It's a huge amount of work, for which they deserve proper credit and kudos. But let's call a spade a spade - what they're producing are Darwin apps, not OS/X apps.

These awards will go to the handful of folks who have taken the extra step of doing a real OS/X port - with an Aqua interface that's compliant with Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, support for Services, hassle-free installs, etc.

gtk

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd give 5 bucks to the person who ports gtk to Mac OS X. (no rootless X Window doesn't count)

Re:Limited?

[bsartist]

It's really just a matter of semantics. The whole idea of the "Macintosh Experience" can be a little vague, and may not make a lot of sense for someone who hasn't spent a lot of time among "old school" Mac users.

Basically, anything that isn't consistent with the look and feel of OS/X - that is, any command line or X11 application - is not considered a "true" Mac application by many of the Mac faithful. In their minds, there is a distinct difference between Mac applications, and applications that happen to run on a Mac. So, while Darwin applications will run under OS/X, they're not OS/X applications.

What Apple is trying to promote with this Open Source category, I think, is the porting of OSS code into "true" OS/X applications that will appeal to the "old school" Mac users as well as recent UNIX converts. It's not really a matter of how much effort is involved; it's more a matter of how well the final result is integrated into the "Macintosh Experience."

So, while the MySQL team has spent countless hours tracking down some obscure threading and signal handling bugs in MySQL on Darwin, they're less likely to win this award than someone who's spent a day or two knocking together a friendly Aqua client app for MySQL. It doesn't seem fair, if you consider only the amount of work involved, but if you think about Apple's goals, it makes a kind of sense.