O'Reilly Thinks Mac OS X May Be the 'Next Big Thing'

Arkham writes "Tim O'Reilly gave a speech at WWDC called 'Watching the Alpha Geeks: Mac OS X and the next big thing', in which he suggested that Apple is doing the right things to be a big success. Specifically, Apple should continue to 1) adhere to standards, 2) keep things small and modular, and 3) document as you go -- man pages and RFCs. Anyone who has used Mac OS X can see that Apple is trying hard to be a good open-source citizen (for example, the new zero-config Rendezvous technology). The question is, at what point will these efforts pay off (more users, and thus more money)?" What is this "money" you speak of?

Comments

Re:Where Apple is going

[feldsteins]

Apple has become very successful over the last few years

Well if by "few" you mean "twenty" then yeah :)

Apple addressed this with the iMacs, iBooks and Mac OSX IMO, by providing a simple "dumbed down" UI

Um...Again it sounds like you are unaware that Apple has been all about ease-of-use for the last two decades.

(and this will go even further with the next release of OSX, which has a "simple finder" option)

Yet again...this feature has been available for years in previous versions of the Mac OS. Quite useful, I'm told, for very young children.

Re:Apple, a good open source citizen ?

[jasonwileymac.com]

Maybe you should visit the Darwin Project page and learn about how much they have improved.

Re:Where Apple is going

[EddydaSquige]

The latest issue of Macworld has a short blurb about the G5 (near the end of an article on the new Ghz chips). Apparently Motorola does sell G5's for embedded systems but has no imedate plans for G5 on the Mac. But they are out there.

Re:Apple, a good open source citizen ?

[overunderunderdone]

What projects do they contribute open source code to ?

All ive heard is that they use *bsd code, do they improve and contribute the code upstream ?

From what I have heard YES, apple has contributed code back to the projects they have used: gcc, apache, perl, freebsd, mysql, emacs, openssh etc.

Then of course there are their own projects that have been released under the APSL. There is a lot of debate about whether this license is "open source" or not. Whatever your opinion on it they have used it to release the Darwin OS, the Darwin Streaming Server (for streaming Quicktime content) OpenPlay (a network abstraction layer based on Apple's old NetSprockets technology) and HeaderDoc (A tool for generating HTML reference documentation from comments in C, C++ and Objective-C header files..)

Re:Where Apple is going

[blakespot]

Inkwell is based on Newton HWR technology. The 'Rosetta' print recognizer on the Newton 2.x devices, written in-house by Apple, has yet to be surpassed in the world of HWR technology. The second best I've seen is Calligrapher, originally written by Paragraph, who wrote the cursive recognier on the Newton 2.x devices. Today's Calligrapher is still no match for the 5+ year old Rosetta HWR engine.

Apple need not "catch up" with MS on this one...

(Reminiscent of MS's ClearType sub-pixeling technology. It was seen first on the Apple II, yet MS claims it as their own technology.)

blakespot

Re:Apple, a good open source citizen ?

[stevenprentice]

Read the release notes for FreeBSD 4.5. It mentions a number of filesystems bugs that were found and fixed because of a file system test application that Apple contributed.

Re:Documentation

[Duck_Taffy]

There is a new version of the Apple Developer's Toolkit, currently in beta, which has complete Cocoa documentation, so just wait a bit, and quit yer whining. I know they're still working on carbon docs, but in case you didn't catch the WWDC 2002 keynote highlights, Apple doesn't want developers using CFM anymore.

Re:emacs?

[TTop]

There's a pretty decent Cocoa-ized version of emacs 21.1 at http://www.porkrind.org/emacs.

I don't think it uses variable-width fonts, but it's better then the terminal version, IMHO.

Re:reality check

[tadghin]

Actually, the brief report didn't quite capture the thrust of my remarks (which will be up in some form on oreillynet.com within a day or two).

My point was this: if you look at the "alpha geeks", you often can see the shape of the future long before it's obvious in the commercial market. This was true with the PC (which was derided as a toy by the establishment), with the web (ditto), and so on with many new technologies.

Hackers push the envelope to make technologies do what they want before vendors and entrepreneurs package them for other people. My point is that a lot of the things that the hackers and other alpha geeks have been incorporating into their lifestyle for some time - wireless, chat, web services (even if only created by web spidering and screen scraping), peer-to-peer (rendezvous), etc. - are all starting to show up in a nice package.

So to me, this is a good predictor that Apple is really on the right track.

The second part of the talk was somewhat unrelated. It was advice for the future based on what has been successful for Unix, the internet, and open source.